(image courtesy DayStar Digital)

The Unofficial Turbo 601 Site Willi Murray's Hideous Printing Problem

Turbo 601/Mac OS 8.0 Low Level Printing Problem? (Posted Monday 2 February 1998)

Our small typesetting, origination and prepress services business uses three Macs: the faithful IIvi/Turbo 601, a Performa 475 and a PowerMac 7100/80. Until yesterday all three Macs were running MacOS 8.0. We'd never had any problems at all, not even with the Turbo 601 upgraded Mac IIvi, which was running beautifully with MacOS 8.0.

We have two printers: a GCC BLP IIS which is used for general output and proofing, and a Xante PlateMaker II which is used for plain-paper CRC, film and polyester plate output.

To speed up output from the BLP IIS, I finally attached a hard disk to it on Friday (30 Jan). This is when the problems started.

After I downloaded our PostScript font collection to the BLP IIS's hard disk, I created an updated PPD which included the downloaded fonts, and set up the printer drivers on all three Macs appropriately. All three Macs were using LaserWriter 8.5.1.

Friday PM

Almost every print job sent to the BLP IIS from the IIvi/Turbo 601 would now fail to finish. At some point the print job would hang, with the Print Monitor reporting 'Preparing Data' and the BLP IIS reporting 'Waiting'. Eventually we'd get a PostScript timeout.

At first I thought there was something wrong with the hard disk, or that somehow the BLP IIS/Hard Disk combination was at fault. So I then tried sending the same print jobs from the 7100/80 and then the Performa 475. These two machines printed every job without a single hitch. Just to be sure, I identified several jobs that the T601/IIvi had particular problems with, and printed them multiple times from each machine. Sure enough, printing failed each time from the T601/IIvi, but worked every time from the other two machines.

I then disconnected the hard disk from the BLP IIS and repeated the multiple 'difficult' print jobs exercise. Things improved somewhat with the T601/IIvi. Sometimes the jobs would print OK, other times they would hang up. The other two machines continued printing without problem. So whatever the problem is with the T601/IIvi, it seems to be marginal -- relatively simple print jobs work OK all the time, but more difficult jobs will sometimes fail to finish. For some reason attaching the hard disk to the printer makes the problem worse, BUT IT IS NOT THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM.

Saturday

I re-attached the hard disk to the BLP IIS, and started experimenting with the MacOS 8.0 configuration on the T601/IIvi. After about 3 hours I realised I wasn't getting anywhere and then I repeated everything I'd done during the last three hours using, in turn, LaserWriter 8.3.4, Abode PSPrinter 8.3.1 and AdobePS 8.5.1. Same result every time -- print jobs failing to complete. Nothing made any difference -- disabling Desktop Printing, booting with minimal Control Panels and Extensions etc etc.

By the end of the day I'd completed a complete clean re-installation of MacOS 8.0 on the T601/IIvi and a complete re-installation of printer drivers on the T601/IIvi. None of this fixed the problem.

Sunday

I booted the T601/IIvi with System 7.5.1 which I always keep a copy of on a spare partition on one of my disks. Instant success. All the print jobs that had been failing with MacOS 8.0 printed without any problems whatsoever. I then spent a fair bit of time switching between MacOS 8.0 and 7.5.1 on the T601/IIvi just to confirm my findings, but there can be no doubt about this whatsoever -- the printing problem on the T601/IIvi is somehow related to MacOS 8.0.

I copied over a System 7.6.1 folder for the IIvi/T601 from an archive CD, and was able to confirm that this version of the system software exhibited the same problem.

Conclusions

MacOS 8.0 on my Turbo 601 upgraded IIvi introduces a low level printing problem which causes printer communications with the BLP IIS to timeout. The problem is exacerbated by, but not caused by, connecting a hard disk to the BLP IIS (perhaps this might provide a clue to someone who has a detailed understanding of Mac/Printer PostScript communications).

The 7100/80 and the Performa 475, which also have MacOS 8.0 installed, print without problem to BLP IIS/hard disk combination using the same printer drivers as the T601/IIvi.

The same problem occurs with System 7.6.1.

The problem does not occur with System 7.5.1.

Perhaps the problem might be something to do with Open Transport? It would be interesting to run System 7.5.5, switching between Classic Networking and Open Transport. But I don't have time to investigate this further until next weekend.

Maybe it's something to do with the fact that the BLP IIS is a PostScript Level 1 printer. The Xante is a Level 2 PostScript printer, and I have noticed that the spool files generated by Level 1 PostScript can be much larger than spool files generated by Level 2 PostScript. I haven't tried any of this on the Xante yet, it's much more expensive to run than the BLP IIS, so I don't want to run too many trial jobs through it. I also didn't have time, I was concentrating on the BLP IIS which is the printer we use most. When I get time, maybe next weekend, I'll try printing some of the problem jobs from the T601/IIvi to the Xante using MacOS 8.0.

In the meantime, if anyone has any thoughts or suggestions about all of this please don't hesitate to email me. I'd really appreciate some help on this one.

Return to Home Page