Subject: ansiprt

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: 21 Oct 1994 20:48:37 GMT

I love Pine's ability to print to an attached-to-ansi printer.
Ansiprt, which comes with Pine, is a way to print files outside
of Pine (either with "ansiprt < filename" or at the end of a
pipeline "|ansiprt") but it doesn't seem as robust as Pine's
Y command.  Often with ansiprt some characters are lost.  Do
other people experience this or is this a problem with my
system?  Also, what other tools are there for doing this -
I know about ansiprint (note this is different than ansiprt)
but it also isn't very robust.

Thanks much,
Nancy

--

 **  **    Nancy McGough             |  "No one suspects the
*  **  *   Infinite Ink              |   days to be gods."
 **  **    ftp://ftp.ii.com/pub/ii   |                     -Emerson

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 09:53:37 -0700 (PDT)

On 21 Oct 1994, Nancy McGough wrote:

> system?  

Nancy,
I don't really know what's going on here, but I suspect a flow-control
problem.  The ansiprt code is *very* similar to what Pine uses.  The main
difference (new in Pine 3.91) is that you now have an option in Pine of
ignoring (the new default) or preserving XON/XOFF characters.  I believe
ansiprt will preserve them... so if your printer or comm software sent an
XOFF, ansiprt will stop sending until an XON is received.  That should work
fine *if* the XON is forthcoming. 

I gather that if you print the same msg via ansiprt and Pine's
attached-to-ansi option, that the former loses characters.  Are the lost
characters in big chunks, or scattered throughout? 

You might also experiment with the "preserve-start-stop-characters" feature,
and see if one or the other settings makes Pine as flakey as ansiprt. 

-teg

p.s. the change in default was made because too many people were reporting
bugs about Pine "hanging" when they inadvertently hit ^S (XOFF).