RISC OS 5.18 and Apple LW NTX

Here’s a strange one: Printing using the Apple LW II NTX Postscript printer driver fails.

OK, more detail: A some might know I publish GAG-News using Aemulor Pro and Impression Publisher on my IYONIX pc. BTW I’d love to move on the a Beagle/Panda based system but since I do need Impression Publisher and until now neither Impression-X nor Aemulor Pro appeared for these I’m stuck with the good ol’ IYONIX pc. (I did look at Ovation Pro when the IYONIX pc arrived due to Impression being out of support and 26 bit only but I just didn’t feel comfortable with Ovation Pro so I stuck to Impression Publisher).

I was out of the country for several weeks and since GAG-News is due in the odd months (i.e.this one in March 2012) I first finished issue 120, printed and mailed it before looking into RIS OC 5.18 since until now I never was late publishing the GAG-News and with the issue that finalizes 20 years of GAG-News I didn’t want to be late…

OK, then I ensured !Boot to be up to date (using the !Boot from the Harddisc 4 image from ROOL web site as input) and first opted for the softload variant of RISC OS 5.18. Worked fine for most things. HideSCSI didn’t quite do the job (but that has a good reason and a workaround is on the forum so fine with that one) and Filer- fails (see the other post I put here a few minutes ago).

So I took my IYONIX pc through several tasks including Impression Publisher and tried to print the current GAG-News again (as usualy printing with the Apple LW II NTX Postscript 2 printer driver that does black/white only). Reason for using this printer driver is that the output of that one was best (quite some time ago by now) for passing the output on to the company who did the printing for me – the main benefit being it offering no colour. (By accident I once created the PostScript file with the normal PostScript 2 printer driver and thus with colour and this file was useless for the printing bureau – not surprinsing knowing how bad the bigger colour images are put into the PostScript 2 file).

Ever since I stuck to that printer driver since it does the job, though by now I run the PostScript output through the Ghostscript tools psbook and psnup and then convert it in PDF with GSView (I tried with ps2pdf but that tool didn’t work reliably) and then print it on my own A3 black&white laser printer.

OK, with RISC OS 5.18 in place printing to the Apple LW II NTX printer driver failed with a nice data abort. Printing again then resulted it pretty wild output on the screen (2/3 black with then parial display of the file to print showing). OK, so I made sure I use the newest version of Printers and reinstalled the Apple LW II NTX printer defintion file – no change. When I tried with the generic PostScript 2 printer defintion printing worked fine.

First print failed on page 12 or 13 (not quite sure which one) but printing just these works with no error; printing 10-14 works, 1-14 failes, all failes, etc. so basically the contents of that page is probably not the sole reason for the failure.

Strange, isn’t it?

Not critical since there is no reason for me to not use a different printer definition file but perhaps important since this issue might show that the black/white only PostScript 2 printing might have an issue now and you never know if other need just this.

Maybe it has something to do with this problem

Check if the printerdriver is present in !Boot.
You could use the zip file of the Harddisc 4 image from the website, not the tarball. That one is correct.

Hope this helps.

Peter

Thanks – but does not have impace as far as I can tell since
1. The error was present with the former PDF already (the one that worked with RISC OS 5.16 before that version)
2. I use the Apple LW II NTX and not the Apple LW 16
3. I used the Harddisc4/util image
4. I tried the bzip2 commandline tool – no errors with that one

Herbert