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Printing To A Buffer Expandable Print Sharer,
DocumentID: 633570
Revision Date: 29-Feb-96 3:03:20 PM

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

Problem

Symptoms: The customer has reported difficulties printing to his Buffer Expandable Print Sharer, Model Pi225 by Black Box Corporation. This is a print sharing device. The first user sends a print job. While the print sharer is processing the first user's print job, a second user sends a job to print from a different machine. At this point, the second user's machine appears to stop until the first user's print job is completed. Solutions: Development is aware of the problem the customer reported. They explained the following information about the source of the problem. WordPerfect used to send a NULL character to the serial port because many serial printers do not tell WP that they are ready to print until they get their first character. Since NULL was lost by all known printers at that time, (this dates back to WP 3.0), there was no problem with this. WordPerfect removed the NULL in 5.0 because it was messing up some newer printers, but this caused all the old printers that had this problem to act up again. So WordPerfect decided to do what seemed to work in all cases at the time; they bypassed the port status test on the first character of the print job. WordPerfect just sends it right out. If it comes back with a timeout error, then WordPerfect delays for at least one second and tries again. WordPerfect continues doing this until the first character is successfully sent, at which time WordPerfect starts checking the port status for all additional characters.

The problem this customer is experiencing is that serial port timeouts take two or three seconds, (this is the DOS default, but software could change it to any value), so the computer will appear locked during each of these timeouts, which will continue as long as the print sharer is busy. The solution to this problem would be to select LPT1 in WP and use the DOS Mode command to redirect the output to COM1. This will bypass the special checking that WordPerfect is doing and should work fine. The enhancement request to make here is to allow an option under the port setup information to determine whether or not WordPerfect should check the port status before the first character. If you continue to receive calls on this, please contact your team leader who can take the necessary steps to include the problem on the common call list.

Answer:

Details:


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