v2.4.4 09feb01 MJS The baud-rate mapping capability introduced in 2.4.3 had broken the -b## flag. Fixed. Adjusted spooler interface scripts to document and allow setting of baud-rate mapping when needed. Fixed up some comments in slpro.c that were a bit out of date (ie: did not accurately describe the newer supported models). Tidied up the HOWTOs. v2.4.3 30jan01 MJS NOTE: only released to one user, for platform testing and for proof-of-concept regarding baud-rate mapping. Use of 57600 baud facilities in slpro.c was not *completely* conditional, preventing compilation on Irix 5.3 and AIX 4.1. Fixed: 57600 baud facility is only enabled on platforms where it is available. Fixed bug in "printer-reset" code in slpro.c. This bug could only be triggered in extremely unusual error-situations, and was never reported from the field. Added support for those serial-port drivers that can provide 57600 baud facilities *only* by pretending that request for a lower speed is really one for 57600 baud, eg: when a program uses termios B50, the O/S port driver sets 57600 baud. The two initial baud-rate mapping schemes are: IBM RS/6000, AIX 4.x, 7318 8-port concentrator or 128-port adaptor, port initialised with "/usr/lbin/tty/stty-cxma fastbaud tty#". Thanks to Tren Blackburn for testing this. Solaris/SPARC 2.1-2.4, Magma 4SP, 8SP or 16SP SBus serial-port card. The magma driver for Solaris 2.5 and later supports 57600 baud using the normal mechanism. Expect more mapping-schemes for other old operating-systems/device-drivers. Fixed a termios/protocol race-condition in slplus.c. The bug only shows up on platforms that have a broken tcdrain() function, when running on *fast* machines, eg: Linux on 600+ MHz PCs, thus was previously hidden. The fix was designed and contributed by Werner Panocha, who claimed not to be a UNIX programmer... which is remarkable considering the subtle termios nature of the fix! Added HOWTOs describing how to use other fonts and how to print barcode labels. v2.4.2 19sep00 MJS Promoted conditional alpha-test code for 240 to "production" status. Minor corrections to manpage. Rationalised internal full-printer-model names, as used by the "output to bitmap" debugging device-driver. v2.4.1 25aug00 MJS Suppress termios BRKINT semantics during autodetection in each driver, to prevent the probes generating spurious interrupt signals on a very few hardware configurations. This made autodetection of printer-type unreliable on those very few systems: had to specify printer-type explicitly. Sun Ultra-10 and SPARCstation-20 exibit this behaviour, but the Sun SPARCclassic, SPARCstation-5, Ultra-1/170E, and all the PCs I can find do not. It sure is not a UART, driver or cabling issue (identical UARTs, drivers and cables can behave differently). Presume it must be a difference in pull-up/pull-down resistors external to the UART... except that there is a timing issue (problem disappears when run under truss with all truss-output disabled). Strange. Verified that there were no memory-leaks or memory-access-errors, just in case. In any case, the fix applied is generic - apppropriate for all situations and systems. v2.4 17aug00 MJS Added support for new printer models: SLP-100 SLP-100N SLP-200 SLP-200N Added alpha-testing support for SLP-240. Note that these new printers default to 57600 baud, which means they can *only* be used on systems that provide the common B57600 and CRTSCTS extensions to POSIX.1 termios. The Solaris 2.x and Linux 2.x.x POSIX.1 APIs have the B57600 and CRTSCTS extensions, but I am not sure about others (HP-UX, AIX, etc). So we emit an error message if the user explicitly selects one of those models on systems where B57600 or CRTSCTS is not available. In auto-probing mode such printers will simply not be detected. Note that these newer printers also require that the *system* serial-port hardware properly supports 57600 baud... users of pre-Ultra Sun sytems will have to check their on-board serial-ports for the famous Zilog 8530 and Solaris "zs" driver bug, as documented in the manpage. Fixed typo's in some comments in slpro.c v2.3.2 05apr00 MJS Fixed crash if output-port not specified - now (again) correctly uses standard-output in that case. Added time-limited "wait_for_idle()" call to the "set_baud()" funtions in the printer-drivers, to improve reliability of auto-probing. Heavily tested autoprobing on reference platforms. Changed the style of structure type definitions in slap.h, to make debugging with gdb easier - seperate "struct" and "typedef" declarartions. Fixed invisible file-descriptor and signal-mask leaks in opentty() - the leaks will never arise in slap, but needed fixing for other serial-port programs that "borrow" port.c. v2.3.1 30jan00 MJS Fixed incorrect type of return expression at slpro.c:1174 - some compilers complained. v2.3 23jan00 MJS Fixed bug where glyphs with maximal extents did not print on the first line of the label. This bug only effected (some) third-party barcode fonts. It still amazes me that several users have generated their own fonts using the included font utilities, as well as reconfiguring an X font server to allow them to do it, both steps being undocumented... Portrait versus landscape output now selectable from the command-line. This required some generalisation of the renderer. Fixed definition of "35mm slide" label size/orientation, but am unable to test it myself - cannot source this type of label :(. Code review exposed an unlikely but potential timeout-whilst-waiting-for-ready bug in the SLP Plus family driver. Fixed. Restructured the (internal) device-driver interface, for the above fixes and to allow "hybrid" device- drivers, such as a driver that outputs an MBM-format bitmap file (great for debugging the renderer). The above also involved separating the driver-name table from the top-level session-handling code: new module glue.c defines the driver-name mapping internally, and exports a lookup function for other modules to use. Removed the somewhat ad-hoc debugging "dump" code from the renderer - now can use the MBM-driver instead. Couple of declarations added to prevent compiler warnings. Expanded instructions for using slap with the LPRng spooler, and tidied up the instructions for the BSD spooler. Thanks to gregbo@delanet.com for these. Manpage had omitted "Shipping Labels" from the list of valid label sizes. Fixed. v2.2.6 10sep99 MJS More generalised configure scripts. Now handles newer Linuxes (based on 1.2.x kernels) without manual intervention. Configure scripts now also produce explicit instructions when they detect that manual intervention may be required. The -version flag now also displays the platform-specific configured options used to build the executable. This is mainly to help spot broken platforms in future. Manpage updated as per. v2.2.5 10aug99 MJS Documentation change only: "lpd" spooler-setup guide changed to specify "input-filter" rather than an "output-filter" to avoid spooler bugs and discrepancies between different versions of "lpd". v2.2.4 27apr99 MJS Fixed SVR4-style printer-interface script to reference $MAXBAUD and $MEDIA on the slap command-line. Also fixed a couple of minor typos in said script. Added SVR3-style printer-interface script. Made configuration scripts more flexible to cater for slightly wierd platforms (eg: Irix C compiler). Also noticed that POSIX.1 specifies that the symbolic constant PATH_MAX is optional, so changed to use dynamic method - pathconf(). Thanks, scerutti@dtsi.com. v2.2.3 30jan99 MJS Under Linux, was getting SIGSEGV if standard-output was redirected to the serial-port, due to an erroneous assumption in the "Pro" driver that malloc()-ed heap was initialised to zero. Fixed - thus removing the need to **explicitly** specify the output port in the "lpd" filter script. Fixed font-path in the sample print-filter scripts. v2.2.2 27jan99 MJS adjusted Configure script to forcibly set the makefile variable NODRAIN on Linux platforms, because newer releases of GCC fail to define the symbol __linux__, which was used previously to detect broken implementation of tcdrain(). Thanks, jerryn@ici.net. v2.2.1 24jan99 MJS adjusted manpage: changed references to Seiko Instruments' products to use their "official" names, and added SII registered trademark notice. Also disabled DEBUG logic in render.c that was accidentally enabled in the 2.2 release. Whoops. v2.2 10jul98 MJS major restructuring of driver interface to allow easy "plug-in" of drivers for new printer models. added support for SmartLabel-120 and SmartLabel-220 (surprise, surprise!). Found the bugs in the SLP-120 firmware and worked round them! added "auto-detect" of printer type (new driver code, and new session-framework code). more label sizes: small, strip, slide, cass, leitz, large. tested on additional platforms: Sun SPARCclassic Solaris 2.2 (with all the ldterm/zs patches!) Axil HWS-210 (SS2 clone) Solaris 2.5 Sun Enterprise-6000 Solaris 2.5.1 Sun Enterprise-150 Solaris 2.5 Sun Ultra-2/1200 Solaris 2.5.1 Sun Ultra-1/170 Solaris 2.5 SPARCstation-5 Solaris 2.6 That's enough - only significantly different test platforms listed from now on... fixed bug in the sample "lp" printer-interface script, to gain more accurate reporting of status by "lpstat". enhanced supporting font-import tools to handle glyphs that (intentionally) exceed their font-metrics. Also fixed a couple of minor bugs in the tools. Distributed font files unchanged. ... jan98 MJS tested with network-based "shared virtual serial-port" subsystem (Central Data EtherLite port server) on Solaris, to verify that high-latency serial links did not break anything. Works fine. v2.1 30jun97 MJS improved recovery from signals - properly closes down communication with printer. This allowed users to cancel a print-job without leaving the printer in a wierd state. made driver-interface "session"-based and reentrant for future use (eg: program that needs two drivers active simultaneously, such as an X window driver and a printer driver). optimised the use of the printers' communication protocols for faster printing. adjusted rendering-engine to properly handle glyphs that extend outside their bounding-box. v2.0 15may97 MJS initial version - starts at 2.0 to distinguish from earlier (1994) program, "slpd". wrote tools to convert Type 1 PostScript outline fonts into bitmap fonts. Used to generate the distributed bitmap fonts. source APIs: ANSI C (ANSI X3.159-1989) POSIX.1 (IEEE Std 1003.1-1988) MJS Portable C Library printers: SmartLabel, SmartLabel-Plus, SmartLabel-EZ30, SmartLabel-Pro. label sizes: std, euro, disk, ship. tested platforms: Sun SPARCclassic Solaris 2.4 (via built-in ports and an 8-port Magma/8sp SBus card) Sun SPARCstation-5 Solaris 2.4 Sun SPARCserver-10 Solaris 2.4 Sun Ultra-1/140 Solaris 2.5.1 386 PC (8250 UART) Slackware Linux 3.0 486 PC (16450 UART) RedHat Linux 4.0 486 PC (16550 UART) RedHat Linux 4.0 wrote sample printer-interface scripts for integration with the UNIX SVR4 "lp" subsystem, and the BSD "lpd" spooler.
