SPARCprinter && Postscript: Just say NO!

[Wes Boudville]

> I purchased a Sun Sparcprinter in January and attached it to a
> Sparcstation 2.  It works great for printing out listings and dopey troff
> stuff, but has subtle problems with its Postscript implementation that
> make it worthless for doing anything with Postscript.  A typical example:
> take a Microsoft word document from a PC and try to print it on the
> Sparcprinter.  Underlining comes out in the wrong places, and graphics are
> positioned incorrectly.  I have a sample Postscript program (about 70
> lines), which I have printed out on printers by Apple, GCC, Dataproducts,
> Next, NEC, QMS...  with the output identical from all printers.  It gets
> totally screwed up when printed on the Sparcprinter.
	...
>In desparation, I write this note, wondering how many others have tried to
>print Postscript files from Macs, PCs or other programs on the
>Sparcprinter and have had problems. 

I recently installed Newsprint on a sun4, writing to an HP 3 printer.  I
encountered similiar problems. One of our users made a graph using Excel
on a PC to generate a Postscript file. He sent this to the sun4 & thence
to the printer.  The top halves of the labels were omitted, and spurious
vertical gaps appeared in the histogram. Axes numbers were also
incorrectly placed. The same file was sent to another sun that had an
Apple laserwriter and wasn't using Newsprint. It gave correct output.

In another case, a user ran a graphical program called mongo on a sun.  It
made a Postscript file. This was sent to the HP via Newsprint.  The errors
here were subtler, but still apparent. The ends of the axes ticks were
misaligned by ~ 1 pixel. And the labels looked smudged - almost every
character had misplaced pixels.  Sending this file to the Apple & not
using Newsprint produced correct results.

I informed Dan Quinn of Sun about this. He was very helpful. I emailed the
Postscript files to him. He found that sending these via Newsprint to a
Sparcprinter also gave the same problems.  This isolated the problem to
the Newsprint software. Because now the printers had been varied, and the
input software making Postscript was from 2 different sources. He filed 2
bug reports with Sun Engineering. Sometime in the future, they'll fix it.

		Dr Wes Boudville
		Physics Dept
		Caltech