Printing, etc.

[Jian Liu]

Dear all,

I'd like to hear what you have to say about network/windows printing. 

I spent sometime this week configuring our small public web cluster of 9
pcs, Pentium 75 with 16 mb of ram, running windows 95, all sharing an HP
LaserJet 5M printer with built-in JetDirect card. The printer used to be
connected a novell 4 file server, which is in another subnet, as the print
server for the cluster.

I have finally made a switch today from IPX to TCP/IP. Now each of the 9
pcs prints directly to the printer via JetDirect. I think I see some
improvement in print speed, at least that's what I hope to see. Is it
really faster? What's your experience? I haven't tested it more thoroughly
yet, but I seem to have lost the function of killing print jobs. Do you
know of any other advantages or disadvantages? Any warnings? 

Another option I have is Microsoft Network printing: using a NT server
as the print server, and let the cluster print to the NT server first,
which then directs print jobs to the printer. I haven't tried it yet
and am wondering if it has advantage over TCP/IP printing or not.

Finally, with more and more of our dos based computers going windows 95
based, the dot matrix printers become more and more annoying (noisy and
slow), but we can't just put laser printers out there, for we still want
to use the continuous printing, to save paper. I know there have been
several rounds of discussions about printers on this list, but would like
to know if you have some recent experiences with some printers that are:

1. using continuous paper
2. fast and quiet
3. easy to maintain
4. relatively inexpensive

If you know of such printers, I'd like to hear from you. Again, if there
are enough interest, I'll summarize.

Thanks

Jian
Indiana University Libraries

p.s. a quick note about the question I asked earlier in regard to multi
lingual display with a web browser: I didn't receive much information from
the list. So not much to report back. But I do have some progress with it,
quite co-incidentally, I should say: shortly after I posted the question
IE4 was released. I tried it and liked it, for one specific reason: it
supports foreign languages display (with additional font installation,
under the Help menu, then Product Updates). Now I have tentatively
installed it on one of the machines in the cluster, which can support
display of Pan European (including Baltic languages, central European
languages, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Ukrainian, and CJK.  I am
quite happy with it, and it is easy to switch among them.  It's not prime
time yet. I am still having a student test it to make sure it is
displaying those lanugages correctly.  One thing we have already found out
is that it displays fine, but does not print some languages correctly. Is
this related to fonts not being sent to the printer correctly? Any ideas?