[HECnet] Printing to an LA75 using VMS queues and form definitions

On 08/03/11 21:51, Steve Davidson wrote: Mark, Do you remember how you initially defined the queue? Hoff is right about them being a pain. Printers and backups were the biggest headaches on VMS at DEC without question. LAT printers (queues) were much worse than directly connected ones! I remember it as being a bit of a moving target on the best of days. -Steve -----Original Message----- From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Mark Wickens Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 16:28 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: [HECnet] Printing to an LA75 using VMS queues and form definitions Hi guys, I have printing working to my LA75+ dot matrix printer via a spooled VMS queue which communicates via LAT with the printer attached to a DECserver 90L+. Everything is working fine except for two issues: 1. I'd like to be able to print with a form definition which leaves a margin at the top and bottom of the page. I tried this: $ DEFINE/FORM LISTING 3 /WIDTH=132/PAGE=66/MARGIN=(TOP=6,BOTTOM=6)/STOCK=DEFAULT/NOWRAP/TRUNCATE $ SET QUEUE/DEFAULT=FORM=LISTING LA75$PRINT_ALEPH$ I tried asking Hoff but I think he's sick of my 80's related questions, his response was entitled: Classic printing best left to masochistic perfectionists <http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/766#comment-2424> (http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/766) I think I'm almost there, but the printer appears to be ignoring the bottom margin - I get a top margin fine, and the listing is not exhibiting 'rolling' ie the content of the output is aligned correctly on each page. Anyone got any ideas what I can do? I want to be able to put listings in vertical binders, and that just doesn't work without both top and bottom margins being honoured. Regards, Mark Oh, I think you might just now expose me as a noob... I used DCPS to initially define the queue... forgetting that it's a pointless exercise for this (distinctly non-postscript) printer! Maybe I need to drop the queues and recreate? As it stands the queue looks like this: BUBBLE$$ show queue/full LA75$PRINT_ALEPH$ Terminal queue LA75$PRINT_ALEPH$, idle, on ALEPH::LTA75:, mounted form DEFAULT /BASE_PRIORITY=4 /DEFAULT=(FORM=DEFAULT) Lowercase /OWNER=[SYSTEM] /NO_INITIAL_FF /PROTECTION=(S:M,O:D,G:R,W:S) I deliberately set the LTA75: 'terminal' to /WIDTH=132 and /PAGE=66 which is the page length. The printer starts up in 132 column mode. Mark.