Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!Germany.EU.net!news.dfn.de!news.belwue.de!zib-berlin.de!irz401!uriah!not-for-mail
From: j@uriah.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.apps
Subject: Re: Serious Ghostscript problems in NetBSD-1.0Beta (PLEASE READ!!!)
Date: 26 Sep 1994 18:39:58 +0100
Organization: Private U**X site; member IN e.V.
Lines: 47
Message-ID: <36711eINNbpa@bonnie.sax.de>
References: <35lphd$bh2@jetsam.ee.pdx.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: bonnie.sax.de
mcura@ee.pdx.edu (Melissa L. Cura) writes:
>For some stupid reason, ghostscript just does not work correctly. It works,
>but not the way it's supposed to, at least in my case. My problem concerns
>my Stylus 800 printer. Has anyone out there used ghostscript with an Epson
>Stylus 800 printer? If not, maybe someone can relate to my dilemma and maybe
>even help me fix it.
[Printer sometimes prints right, sometimes produces garbage.]
I'm running an Epson SQ-870 succesfully with a FreeBSD box, already
for rather long time now. It's the lpd server of our company, and the
lpd setup also allows to pipe the document thru ghostscript.
Everything works fine, except some problems with paper size. The
ESC/P2 driver of ghostscript happens to set the paper size in the
printer, so i can print on A4 paper [which we use for pretty
printing], but cannot print on the very popular 8"x12" fanfold paper.
From your description, it really looks like you might have a hardware
problem with either your printer port, possibly the printer driver, or
the printer cable. Sometimes a byte gets lost "on the way", causing
the printer graphics sequence to get mangled. The next sequence will
be detected incorrectly, so some of its characters are printed as
normal characters. If there are control chars among them (very
likely), effects like a form feed will happen.
You should carefully check your printer port and cable. Try replacing
one of them and see if this will cure the problem. Finally, you've
written about a ``bi-directional'' jumper on the board. This suggests
that you are running one of the newer chips on your port. Maybe (my
final suspection) the system's printer driver cannot handle this chip
correctly. Though they are usually designed to be compatible to their
predecessors, they will (obviously) implement new registers for their
new features. If the driver doesn't know about the new chip, it will
not care about the other registers. This _could_ lead to problems,
though it's very unlikely.
If you really suspect the Ghostscript driver, try using the
traditional Epson driver instead. Your printer should also understand
the old ESC/P protocol, but there's no compression (so the data rate
will be smaller), and you cannot use the hires mode (only 180 dpi).
Besides this, it should also work (and save some ink :-).
--
cheers, J"org work: joerg_wunsch@tcd-dresden.de
private: joerg_wunsch@uriah.sax.de
Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming:
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.