Re: HELP: PostScript from GS/OS?

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Dave Althoff <dalloff@freenet.columbus.oh.us> wrote:

> I also have not been able to get IWEM to work on the HP printers. 

Now that is where we differ.  I _could_ get IWEM working on my HP LJ6MP,
but from past experience it did not work on an HP LJ 4ML.  There may be
a change in the Postscript engine between the printer generations which
happened to allow IWEM to work.

I just did a test print using various attribute changes from a BASIC
program, and it worked fine (apart from minor details like the margins
differing).

> Jeff Blakeney (CUTjefbla@bconnex.net) wrote:
> : I seem to remeber people mentioning this problem and they fixed it by
> : removing something from near the beginning of the postscript file.
> : You might want to load one of your problem postscripts files and
> : compare the beginning with a working postscript file and see if you
> : can't see the problem.

That isn't easy, since the entire document header looks completely
different when printed from a recent Laserwriter driver on the Mac.

There was one obvious problem: the IIgs puts a "statusdict" line right
at the start of the file.  This is likely to confuse the automatic
language detection of the 6MP, as it expects a Postscript document to
start with "%!PS-Adobe".   (This could be avoided by disabling automatic
personality changes and forcing it to recognise Postscript only.)

After I remove this line, I still get a completely useless error message
from the printer:

%%[ Error: invalidaccess; OffendingCommand: def ]%%
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%

Since the 'def' command is used 57 times in this document, this error
message doesn't help much.

Does anyone happen to have more precise information about _what_ needs
to be removed to get IIgs Postscript documents to print on HP Laserjets?

(This is mainly of academic interest, as I rarely want to print anything
from the IIgs these days.)

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand