Subject: printer spooling...

From: Richard Goldberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 09:17:58 -0500 (EST)

Hi all,

Our lab has lots of Macs with a sun server running netatalk for file
sharing. We have 4 printers set up to accept print jobs directly from
the macs over apple-talk. We would like to move the printers onto the
net-atalk server to keep things centralized.

We put them in the papd file and it generally works fine, with the
exception of a few computers. One running OS 8.1 and one running OSX
(current beta). We think the problem might have something to do with the
print jobs needing extra fonts.

Here's a question: How does the spooling process deal with downloading
fonts to the printer? (I.e. the fonts are on the client computer, the
printer finds out when it gets the document from the server that it
needs a couple extra fonts from the client computer, but now its getting
its info from a spool file on the server, rather than from the client
computer.

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks.

***************************** **************************************
*Rick Goldberg              * *                                    *
*Graduate Student           * * "I never wanted to be average,     *
*Computer Science Dept      * *   because when you are average you *
*York University            * *   are just as far from the top as  *
*Toronto, Canada            * *   you are from the bottom."        *
[email-masked]             * *              -Stan Cottrell-       *
*www.cs.yorku.ca/~rickg     * *                                    *
***************************** **************************************
     "If you don't invest very much, the defeat doesn't hurt,
             But winning isn't very exciting."

---

From: andrew morgan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 07:20:22 -0800 (PST)

> its info from a spool file on the server, rather than from the client

Unfortunately, the print spooler is not as smart as one would hope.  :)
It does not have any fonts stored on the server to download to the
printer, and it isn't actually the program talking to the printer.  Papd
just hands the job off to the unix printing software (lpd, lprng, etc),
and that software doesn't deal with fonts either.

If your macs have been setup correctly with printer information, they
should already know which fonts the printer needs and include them in the
print job.  There is also an option on the mac's print dialog box to set
when the mac will download fonts to the printer.  You should check this
setting.  You'll want the middle selection, something like "Downloaded
Needed Fonts Only".

	Andy

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From: Hans Spijkerbosch <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 11:46:37 +0100

> its info from a spool file on the server, rather than from the client
Apple laserwriters performs a 'feature query', in which it ask the
printer lots of questions about the printer itself and a list of the
available fonts.

Knowing this, The laserwriter can setup a desktop printer without
asking what ppd file it must use, and more importantly in your
case, it only download the fonts with each printjob that are not
present on the printer.

I have not digged into the netatalk source code (yet) so I am not
sure about it, but I think this is not implemented.

--Hans Spijkerbosch---