FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS AND THEIR ANSWERS... ----------------------------------------------- Everything you wanted to know about GEM Spooler, but didn't dare to ask... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Question: GEM Spooler doesn't seem to work if I print with Calamus or Timeworks Publisher (or other programs). What's happening ? Answer: These programs - and some other too - print directly to the output port (serial or parallel), bypassing the normal TOS routines. No spooler can help this ! These programs do this to achieve higher printing speed. But usually, printing through TOS with GEM Spooler is even faster than printing directly to the output port ! Therefore, check if your software offers the choice between direct or standard printing (refer to the software's manual). If so, use standard printing. If not, you'll have to settle with the software's choice. Note: Some Calamus printer drivers do print through TOS routines: sometimes serial, sometimes parallel. If your printer needs that driver, you're lucky. Try it out ! Question: If GEM Spooler is activated, my foreground tasks slow down... What is wrong ? Answer: The printer timing is not correctly set and slows down GEM... If your printer is connected to the parallel port, check if the busy interrupt is activated (Timing dialog). If you really want to print in block mode or if your printer is connected to the serial port, lower the block size and/or raise the event timer value. Experiment ! Question: When I print with Adimens, the spooler seems to receive the data but he never creates a print job ! Well, Adimens (and certainly some other programs too) doesn't handle the printer correctly. When starting up, Adimens opens a printer handle (logical printer) for its output and keeps it opened until you leave the program. This is not correct ! The normal procedure is to open a printer handle just before printing, to send the data over this handle and then to close the printer handle again. This first problem can be solved by enabling the GEM Spooler option: Force FCLOSE. This will make GEM Spooler close down output redirection for Adimens on a timeout (twice the normal timeout for GEMDOS and BIOS printing) even when printer handles stay open. Another problem with Adimens (again, there are other programs that suffer from the same disease) is that the program always opens two printer handles: one to print the printer initializa- tion codes with and one to print the actual data with. And it gets even worse: for some dark reason, Adimens does not even use these printer handles, it duplicates them and uses the duplicates to work with. All this has the annoying effect to GEM Spooler are four additional logical printers opened. But monitoring a logical printer for output consumes time and memory: GEM Spooler creates a Multiple Printjob Tracking slot (a kind of control structure) to control each possible print path. By default there are 4 MPT-slots: one to monitor GEMDOS printing, one to monitor BIOS printing and 2 more to monitor applications that print over printer handles. This is largely enough for normal usage. But Adimens already consumes up about 4 printer handles, thus exceeding the monitored application print paths by 2 ! The result is that the output is not redirected, it just disappears in the great nirwana... The solution is to increase the number of MPT slots to 8 in the option menu. Please note also that each MPT needs its part of the write buffer (the buffer that accepts redirected data) so you might want ot increase the write buffer to maintain the same spooling speed as with 4 MPT slots. Question: When I print with some programs, printer output is split up in several print jobs although I only started one printout with my program. Answer: The program you print with does some thinking during printing. Its thinking pauses are so long that GEM Spooler concludes printing must be finished and creates a job. The result is that one print task can be sliced up in several smaller print jobs. The solution is easy: raise the value for the Timeout in the Setup dialog to give your application more time to think before GEM Spooler closes the job (e.g. 10 seconds instead of 5 seconds). Question: GEM Spooler crashes when I print with KSpread or Calligrapher. GEM Spooler crashes if the 'Prompt for jobsettings' is activated under MultiTOS. GEM Spooler crashes if I install a virtual screen with Screenblaster. Answer: You use a version of GEM Spooler older than version 3.0h. Contact us for un upgrade. Question: I have installed VRAM on my TT or Falcon and when I boot now, the system hangs when loading GEM Spooler. There is a lot of harddisk activity and only after some time, the desktop appears. Answer: The GEM Spooler accessory has its fastload flag turned off, because accessories with fastload flag can cause trouble on most TOS versions. This causes VRAM to initialize all virtual memory with null values. This can take some time (depending on the size of the harddisk partition that is dedicated to memory swapping) and is visible in the harddisk activity. The solution is quite simple: turn on the fastload flag of GSPOOL.ACC. This can be done with a utility like PRGFLAGS or MAKECOMP (activate) that comes with VRAM. Question: Sometimes the GEM dialogs do not appear in the center of the screen. That is annoying. Can I change this ? Answer: Try activating the 'Center dialogs' option. If this doesn't help, are you using ScreenBlaster ? Sometimes, ScreenBlaster sets a virtual screen size in the Cookie jar (VSCR cookie) that's just not there. As GEM Spooler follows VSCR information to always position itself in the visible part of the screen, it is misled by ScreenBlaster's wrong settings. Try using an other resolution with ScreenBlaster or try to force the correct settings by changing the virtual screen resolution and than minimizing it again. This sometimes works. Steven Van Rossen, March 1995