Anne Bennett <anne@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:
> I am continuing my recent habit of following up to old postings. :-)
>
> Just over a year ago (on 1999/01/04), Federico Lupi
>> <Federico_Lupi@www.datasys.it> wrote to describe a problem uncannily
>> similar to one I have recently experienced:
>>
>>  I have been using NetBSD 1.3.2 for some months and I am very happy
>> with the system.
>
> I have been using NetBSD 1.4.1 for several weeks at home and a bit
> longer at work, and as usual, I'm delighted with it.  In both cases
> this was an upgrade from 1.2, which had been in use for a few years.
>
>> I had a very old 9 pin Panasonic printer connected to lpt0 and printed
>> (very) low quality text without problems.
>
> I had a very old Citizen dot matrix printer connected to lpt0 which
> would print OK as long as I put in a filter to slow down the output.
> At one point I had had a Canon BJ200,  and was printing to it with no
> problems by running PostScript output through a ghostscript filter and
> text output through a "<CR><LF>" filter.
>
>> Recently I have substituted it with an HP
>> Deskjet 690C; nothing else has changed on the system.
>
> Recently I have substituted it with an HP Deskjet 695C.  I upgraded to
> the latest ghostscript and changed the "device name" in my call to
> ghostscript in my former BJ200 filter.
>
>> My PC has a Tyan motherboard with a Cyrix P166+.
>
> Who knows what my silly hardware is -- I can never remember such
> things!  :-)  An oldish Pentium, anyway.
>
>> Now printing is very slow both with and without Ghostscript: a single
page
>> can take two hours.
>
> Printing became very slow both with and without ghostscript: a
> PostScript page could take six hours to print, a few rows of pixels at
> a time, while text pages would print normally once started, but took
> many minutes to start printing.
>
>> I think that the PC is sending data to the printer continuosly
>> (because the led flashes) but very slowly. The printed page, at the end,
>> is correct.
>
> I saw exactly the same behaviour.
>
>> I have tried changing the cable without result. I changed the bios
setting
>> for the port (EPP, ECC) but NetBSD didn't recognize it any more at boot.
>
> I tried another cable, but did not think to play with the BIOS.
>
>> Finally I changed the driver from lpt0 (interrupt) to lpa0 (polled) in
>> /etc/printcap and everything started working perfectly and very quickly:
>> the same Ghostscript page now takes a few seconds.
>
> Based on Federico's experience, I tried the same, and lo and behold,
> sanity returned to my printing environment!  Choirs of angels burst
> into song, and I went into a printing frenzy.
>
> Now that I have returned to (relative) normality, I'm curious...
>
>> Do you have any idea of what is happening? Why did lpt0 work with the
old
>> printer and not now? Is it normal that EPP/ECC are not recognized?
>
> Did anyone ever figure this out?  I would have expected printing
> performance to be worse with polling, and I would have thought that
> maybe polling would also have a negative effect on system performance;
> I actually noticed no effect on the latter.
>
> Also, has anyone written a piece of software to nab whatever the
> printer says back to us?  It would be kind of nice to be able to
> report printer error messages and so on.
>
>
> Anne.
>
>
> Ms. Anne Bennett, Senior Analyst, IITS, Concordia University, Montreal
H3G 1M8
> anne@alcor.concordia.ca                                        +1 514
848-7606

In the last year I have read some postings on this subject and they are
mostly, but
not only, from people with an HP Deskjet.  IIRC NetBSD is not alone with
this problem
and FreeBSD has (or had) it too. The printer is probably to blame, as
others have
noted.

Regards,

Federico

P.S.  What Ghostscript device are you using for the Deskjet 695C?