On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Mary Bull wrote:
> Philip Chumbley wrote:
>
> > Sounds like you wrote my e-mail for me! I sent out a program to be beta
> > tested last week and I have gotten back reports of printing problems
> > *exactly* as you describe, also with HP printers! My Beta testors reported
> > that the program would print the smae thing continuously. The problem
> > remains if they go to another program and print fron it too. They will have
> > to abort and reload the driver. I am very interested in the resolution of
> > this problem so we can ship our software.
> >
> > An additional problem that was reported to me was that one testor could COPY
> > (to the clipboard) something from a text field in the MC program, and PASTE
> > it into a Word document and then attempt to print. In this case, the printer
> > will not print at all and the user has to reload the driver. i don't know if
> > this is the same problem or something different, but maybe this info might
> > help Scott's crew figure out whats going on.
>
> I had the same problem with a different printer and reported it. I was
> working with a different printer - a Toshiba GX400. I always had to
> reload the printer driver after printing with MC and before printing
> anything from Word.
We've known about this problem for a long time, but upon close
examination, it's always turned out to be a bug in Word (or at least a
driver/Word conflict) because even the other apps in Microsoft Office
print fine as do all other applications. And other applications (even
some Microsoft applications) cause these kinds of problems with
printing in Word. Many bug reports have been filed with Microsoft on
this issue but as far as I know Microsoft has never even acknowledged
any of them, let alone provided a patch or workaround.
This problem *may* be related to the HP printer driver problem
recently mentioned on this list, but it may not be. We still don't
have a reproducible example of either of these problems,
unfortunately, which is why we don't have a fix or workaround for
them. Repeated code walkthoughs have pretty much convinced us that
the engine isn't doing anything wrong or even dangerous, however.
Tom said that the problem is worse in 2.2.5 than it was in 2.2.3,
possibly because we worked around a bunch of *other* bugs in Windows
printer drivers in 2.2.5 (and they were worse bugs, causing crashes in
MetaCard and system lockups in some cases). The "driver reinstall"
problem is particularly annoying, because if those drivers were
written properly, there is nothing that *any* application could do
short of deleting them or corrupting the registry to cause this kind
of problem. Unfortunately, historically only the least experienced
and least talented engineers get assigned to work on printer drivers
and so they tend to be the lowest quality components of any OS. The
wealth of printer (and graphics card) options on Windows is certainly
a double-edged sword, as we spend an order of magnitude more time on
these kinds problems on Windows compared with UNIX and MacOS, which
have much more limited, but generally much higher quality, selections.
If people are interested, it'd be interesting to organize a "group
test" of these things to try to isolate the problem drivers and/or
applications. The place to start would be for someone with this
problem to produce a detailed recipe, starting with a clean printer
driver installation from the OS CD (no fair installing drivers from
CDs that no one else has access to).
Regards,
Scott
> Mary Bull
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
