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

[Mark Wickens]

On 08/03/11 21:33, Gregg Levine wrote:
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Mark Wickens<mark at wickensonline.co.uk>   wrote:
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


Hello!
Mark I have several of those terminal servers here. How is yours
configured, and even wired to your system? (or systems?)

-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
Hi Greg,

It is wired to a 10MB router that has both a 10base2 (BNC) connector and some 10baseT (RJ45) connectors via a thin wire BNC cable connected to T-pieces with a 50 ohm terminator on each end. The 10MB router is connected to a Netgear gigabit router via CAT-5 and then out to the rest of the world.

I configured the terminal server by connecting a terminal/pc terminal emulator to port 1 via a DB9 to RJ45 cable. The management interface allows you to then specify the name of the decserver and the name of the port, and whether it is a printer/terminal port, speed, etc.

Once the port was configured I used the decserver/port name in the LAT configuration on the VAX. I defined a virtual terminal pointing to that decserver/port then pointed the printer queue to that.

The printer connects at 4800 baud to the specified printer port via a MMJ to MMJ cable that came with it.

Hope that sheds some light,

Mark.