Subject: [netatalk-admins] Why don't binary encoded prints work?

From: Tom Fitzgerald <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 16:05:34 EDT

This has been driving me nuts....

Are there any explanations on the net of why binary-encoded print jobs,
fed to non-Mac print spoolers, consistently don't work?  I've been
taking this as a matter of faith for years, but it's a pain trying to
educate the users about this, and it's irritating that ascii-encoded
jobs are so much larger.  (Users here regularly spool 36"x48" postscript
jobs at 100 dpi, you can imagine what an impact a 50% size increase has
on printing time.)  To top it off, some applications don't let you
specify ascii encoding at all, and so simply can't print through netatalk.

I assume it has something to do with CR/LF conversions corrupting the
binary data, but I've never caught any data in the process of being
corrupted.  Clearly, raw binary from PCs or Unix systems work fine.
Is the corruption something that can be overcome on the server side?

Any enlightenment would be appreciated.

---

From: Patrik Schindler <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 00:53:27 +0200

At 16:05 Uhr -0400 24.05.1999, Tom Fitzgerald wrote:

>fed to non-Mac print spoolers, consistently don't work?

I'm using netatalk1.4b2+asun2.1.3 and I never had any problems printing binary encoded jobs from LaserWriter 8.5.1 (which I'm using here) to my QMS PS-410.

However, possibly the driver isn't using binary transfers at all, the printer information dialog shows a questionmark after "Binary" for the spooler, the printer directly shows "yes".

Unfortunately I've no knowledge about PPD files and how to tell the driver to force 8 Bit anyway...

:wq! PoC