Imagens on ethernet and page reversal
laser-lovers@uw-beaver
We have two imagen 8/300 printers, both exclusively on the ethernet
(that is, their only means of communication is the ethernet). We are
quite happy with this. Our previous laser printer was connected to our
VAX with a 9600 baud serial line. Downloading fonts was a real pain.
We usually referred to it as the "9600 baud font downloading blues".
The ethernet Imagen wins in two respects on this: the ethernet is much
faster than 9600 baud, and you don't have to download a whole font to
use it.
Both of our printers have pagereversal on by default. It has been our
experience that, if the printer cannot fit all the pages in memory to
do the reversal, it will blow the reversal off and print out the pages
in the order it got them. So, nothing is lost -- even with troff
output. In other words, it doesn't hurt to turn on pagereversal.
The 8/300 Page Printer User's Manual has this to say:
pagereversal:
...For a single copy of a document, requesting pagereversal on
with pagecollation off is the same as just requesting
pagecollation on.
pagecollation:
...If memory is insufficient to store the entire job,
pagecollation is ignored.
This is just another example of the Imagen software doing exactly what
you would expect and want it to do. On the whole I have been very
impressed (oh, please ignore the pun) with the Imagen printers. They
(almost) always do what I would expect them to. Good job, Imagen!
William LeFebvre
Department of Computer Science
Rice University
<ph...@Rice.arpa>
or, for the daring: <ph...@Rice.edu>
laser-...@cca.uucp
I'd like to challenge some of Phil@Rice's message regarding Imagen 8/300's.
Regarding page reversal, I always thought it would be a much better idea
for the printer to reverse as many pages as it has room for, rather than
ignoring pagereversal completely. In a 100 page job, I'd rather rearrange
2 or 3 sets of properly ordered pages rather than have to manually reverse
all 100 pages.
Another annoying feature regarding pagereversal/pagecollation is that
collation seems to automatically imply reversal. If you know that the
host software is going to send the document in last-page-first order,
it would be nice if you could collate multiple copies WITHOUT
causing page reversal to happen.
Turning to the "it-would-be-nice-if" department, we could save A LOT of
paper if we could suppress job header pages in an intelligent fashion. I
don't want users to be able to be able to play with the JobHeader:OFF
parameter at the time they queue the print job, even if they swear they're
going to walk right over to the printer immediately. It would be useful,
however, if a command could be issued AT the 8/300 console which would
apply to the job in progress, telling it not to print the header page
because I'm going to walk away and leave it on the tray anyway!
Clive
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