Subject: [netatalk-admins] How does printing actually work with papd?

From: "J. Guy Stalnaker" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1999 16:35:55 -0600 (CST)

Me again (keep the groans to a minimum, thank you) ...

After weeks of frustration, I now have a fully functional atalk/asfd/papd
linux box.  I can login with Appletalk set to Appletalk or Ethernet, I can
login using Appletalk or TCP/IP, and I can send print jobs off to the box
and they pop out (if I don't send more than one at a time).

As I said in an earlier post to Linux-Atalk and Netatalk-Admins, sometimes
queueing more than one print job works, and sometimes it doesn't.  I can
only assume that no one else has this problem (since no one else posted a
confirmation or resolution) and thus conclude that what happens is hardware
related (something to do with signals between the printer and the linux
box) and it beyond my ability to fix.

But this post is about fonts and how they work between the Mac and the
linux box.

Uh, exactly how do fonts work between a Mac and linux (and on linux)?

It's my understanding that all papd does is accept a job from the Mac, put
it in the correct spool directory (per the selected printer in the Mac
chooser), and wake up lpd to let it know that there's a print job waiting
on it (right?).  After that, lpd runs the show.

What happens, then, if I want to use an Adobe Type1 font that I would
normally have to download to the printer before printing (my music
character Sonata font, for example) when the printer in question was
attached to my Mac (it is an Apple LaserWriter Select310, which has a Mac
serial port and a PC parallel port on it)?

In Macland, the Mac printing subsystem would make a bitmap of the font and
download the bitmap only if it didn't find the font resident in the
printer's memory.  I used Adobe's FontDownloader program to download the
font whenever I needed to print epsf music graphics in a document, or when
I wanted to print scores from my Mac music notation program, Nightingale.
Now those graphics do NOT print out (the ready light blinks for a while,
then stops blinking, but nothing comes out of the printer).  What is the
analog for linux printing?

I've tried, on the Mac end, downloading a font (crashed
FontDownloader--probably because the connected printer is not the real
thing but a service on another box) and printing to a file and uploading
the file to the linux box to print it from there (nothing comes out).

So I thought to play around with teTeX (or OzTeX on the Mac).  No luck.
Both systems work (though I'm still trying to figure out how OzTeX on the
Mac interacts with the linux box--whose fonts get used, the ones on the Mac
or the ones on the linux box?) to print out regular documents, but neither
can get a postscript file with an epsf music graphic to print (that is,
I've struck out all three ways, regular printing from the Mac, OzTeX
printing from the Mac, and lpr printing of a postscript file from the linux
box).

What happens when one uses teTeX (LaTeX/TeX) and changes a font in a
document one then prints?  Does dvips produce postscript files that handle
font changes, etc.?  While I've found documents (dvips, LaTeX, teTeX, TeX)
that talk about fonts, none of them talk about how fonts get manipulated by
the printing system (or via postscript) in any meaningful way.  One just
selects new fonts, and that seems to be the end of that.  Yet when I select
my Sonata font, nothing happens at print time.  I can only conclude that
since the font is not on the Linux box, that it doesn't get to the printer,
and the print job dies on the page with the font.

Is there a unix utility one can use to download a font into a printer's
memory (after an exhaustive search yesterday on the CTAN archive at Duke
Univ., I could find no such beast)?

All help is appreciated very, very much.

Regards,

Guy Stalnaker

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J. Guy Stalnaker                                  \________/
[email-masked]                         \______/
http://bagend.doit.wisc.edu/theguy                  \____/
Live your life so you've no regrets!                 \__/
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