Subject: Netatalk and PC printing

From: [email-masked] (Patrick Harris)
Date: Thu, 3 Nov 94 15:03:54 EST

We have been using netatalk for a couple of months and we have been very
pleased from the mac side (much much better than the commercial package we
were using to access NFS volumes), but have come across a problem with
printing files on the PC side.

The pcs connect to the sun 670 using PC-NFS and we are trying to use pap to
print to our ethertalked printers (especially our Compaq Pagemarq 20).
Text print jobs print out fine but postscript jobs are causing errors.

Excerpt of lpd-errs:

ofpap[11755]: starting
ofpap[11755]: sending to pap
%%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: ^D ]%%
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
ofpap[11755]: 11756 done

Printcap entry:

8|pagetalk|Pagemarq on AppleTalk:\
      :lp=/dev/null:\
      :lf=/var/adm/lpd-errs:\
      :sd=/var/spool/pagetalk:\
      :pw#80:\
      :hl:\
      :of=/usr/local/atalk/etc/ofpap:
      :if=/usr/local/atalk/etc/ifpaprev:\
      :tf=/usr/local/atalk/etc/tfpaprev:

The print job actually does print out but no banner page is printed and we
get a error message printed out from the printer after the print job as
follows:

Offending Command =
Error = nametype : undefined
            this name is not defined in a dictionary
Stack =
         0

Any ideas?  Thanks in advance.

---

From: [email-masked] (Yaser K. Doleh)
Date: Fri, 4 Nov 1994 16:19:25 -0500 (EST)

Patrick Harris said in a letter
> %%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%

The problem is that your PC is putting a ^D character the the begining
of your postscript file. You can solve this problem in one of two ways

1 - Tell your PC not to put the ^D. I know it can be done but I don't
know how.

2 - Modify psf source to accept the file that starts with ^D and strip
it. 

I used the second solution because I did not know how to do
the first one and I did not have usefull documentation about
the postscript driver for Windows. Sorry, I don't have a patch
but it's an easy fix. Look for the lines where psf checks 
to see if the file is a postscript.

Yaser