[WinMac] Re: Mac printing to HP LaserJet via NT

Alex Dearden(pata[at]tampabay.rr.com)
Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:13:35 -0400

>Interesting. We have several HP printers here, and I saw the "Offending
>Command" error frequently when trying to print from Quark. The fix was to
>always choose Postscript Level 1 on Quark's confusing printer dialogs. In
>my case the printer was a HP 5M; maybe it doesn't support PostScript as well
>as other HP products. Or the problem could have been Quark. All I know is
>that switching to Level 1 output made our documents print again.

Chossing Postscrpt level 1 just makes the code a little more compatible
(albeit longer, less efficient code) and has been a trick often applied
to get recalcitrant printers to spit out something useful. That is not to
say that these printers don't do level 2. The HP 5M does level 2 usually
fine.

Quark, Pagemaker, Freehand and other graphics and page layout apps write
their own postscript code so you have to be very carfeful what options
you choose from within the applications (make sure you select the right
PPD from the app itself for example). Quark 4, for example, has a lot of
printing problems (I don't know what version you are using).

Another problem is where you eventually send the postscript code from,
that is, if you print from the mac but go through an NT spool (instead of
directly to the printer through Appletalk), you may encounter strange
things and postscript errors. This happens a lot when peinting from Quark
with placed pictures, especially TIFFs. The problem is that a lot of
print servers (HP Jetdirect, etc) make assumptions on the code they
recieve depending on the protocol that sent it. They see it coming SMB
from an NT workstation and assume that it is ASCII and was written from a
PC and it doesn't have the CTRL-D, etc (these are just examples, doesn't
mean it happens exactly like that, maybe someone like Leonard Rosenthal
can explain better, being a postscript programmer). But the case is it
was sent from a Mac and was written in binary and Quark encodes
postscript in a certain way (of course adhering to Adobe's standards but
deviating a little), etc, etc, so the printer might get confused and spit
out errors. Even if you leave the default for the NT spool to RAW, you
get this behaviour sometimes because the NT server is not touching the
code but it is changing the protocol that code travels in, it reaches the
NT server in Appletalk packages but then gets put into TCP/IP packages
and sent to the printer...

Conclusion: Whenever possible, print directly to a printer using
Appletalk from a Mac. (another thing to try is changing the code to ASCII
from within Quark).

Hope this helps.

Alex Dearden
pata@doglover.com

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Sat Nov 07 1998 - 07:13:37 PST