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Printer Control Jumps To Page 12 And Holds
DocumentID: 650277
Revision Date: 29-Feb-96 8:28:58 PM

The information in this document applies to:
WordPerfect® 5.1 for DOS

Problem

Symptoms: The customer is using an NEC Spinwriter 3550 printer. When printing multiple copies or long documents with full document option, the printer control screen jumps to about job 12 and stays there while printing the first 12 print jobs, then it jumps 8 to 12 pages and waits again to reach that page number. Solutions: This is not a problem caused by WordPerfect. WP will only send information to the printer as fast as the printer's hardware will accept it. Either the customer has a large hardware buffer installed on the printer's motherboard, or the customer is using some kind of spooler or print buffer.

As an example pretend the customer has installed an Intel AboveBoard expanded memory board in the system. During installation, the customer notices he can set aside just about as much memory as he wants for buffering print jobs. The customer arbitrarily picks 64K. Now, the customer goes into WP and sends a 50 page print job. RAM accepts information much faster than a printer port, and when the customer goes to Printer Control, he sees the pages going by quickly. Even 64K fills up eventually, and so the count stops at about page 12. From then on, as the printer actually gets rid of the information in the buffer, the count increases by one. (Once the buffer is full, it shouldn't count up any faster than the printer prints.) It's possible there are spoolers that fill up and won't accept any more data until they're empty; then they fill up again. This sounds more like the customer's situation.

Print buffers are great for people who want to empty the print queue right away and exit WP to work on something else while the printer prints a long job, but if they're going to do a lot of job canceling or re-prioritizing, they probably don't want such a spooler.

Answer:

Details:


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