I've always had sporadic printing problems when sending work to my Epson 900 stylus color from AW 5.0.4 and Word 98. These go from 'out of memory' messages to 'printer not responding' messages. (I'm running OS 9.0.4 (Spanish) on a G4/400 with 128 RAM.
I won't go into the why's and wherefore's of the matter but will say that I have found several ways to make things (almost always) work.
The solution I'm interested in is this:
Printing from the Temp Spool Files after having quit AW5 and Word98.
This basically frees up memory for the Epson printer extension (although memory is not the root cause of my problems) and leads to 'safe' printing.
Now, This is the normal background printing process:
Two Temp Spool files are created, the Epson Status Monitor gets launched to handle the print quue, the Epson Printer Extension kicks in to handle printing. When the last bits of data have been sent to the printer the Epson Printer Extension closes, the Temp Files get trashed and finally the Epson Status Monitor closes.
All this is obviously automatic. The Temp Files are created and trashed transparently. I decided to get my hands on them by telling the driver to put the Print job into the quee but not print it. With the job on hold the Epson Status Monitor is open with your job in the quee and there is no way to quit the application. I found that manually digging into the Temp Spool Folder and removing the temp files (putting them in a new folder) would avoid them being trashed and the Monitor Application would close as a result. Perfect.
I could now put the Temp files back into the temp folder at a later time, double-click the Epson Status Monitor and print as normal without having AW or Word open.
All this works very well manually but it's a lot of fuss. I want to do it in two clicks. One to move the contents of the Temp Spool Folder to My Spool Folder. And another to move them back. I was hoping to use AppleScript for this and add a button to AW to activate Spool Content Removal. Then use another script to put them back. But I've run into some problems.
When I try to use my 'simpleton' removal script which is a 'Tell Finder to get contents ofÉ/Move contents ofÉ toÉ' type script, I get this kind of message:
The Finder found an error type -1728 and couldn't get contents of "class cfol", "Spool Folder 5".
Spool Folder 5 is the official name of the Epson Spool Folder in the system folder. My guess is (and I don't have much background in AppleScript) that tampering with system folder items must be protected in some way.
Is this correct? Is what I'm trying to do just not possible? Or just ill-advised? Is there a way round this?
The driver does have an option of printing at a later date but requires a date and time and i want to print when I feel like it.
Any Ideas? - Thanks.
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