More LPR over IP problems

[lowell]

This thread about Brother printer problems with LPR/IP printing got me to wondering if anybody else is having the same problem I am. That is:

I've got a good old Apple LaserWriter Select 360, which was a pretty good printer in its day. It's still pretty good. Only problem is, it has only Parallel, Serial and LocalTalk ports. Back when I got the printer, I didn't even have a Mac--I always hooked it up to Windows using the parallel port.

Now I've got an iMac (an old one) and my Windows PC networked, via a 3com home ethernet gateway. This 3com router+switch also has an LPR print server built in, which is meant to make any parralel printer available over the network as an LPR printer. I can set up my Windows 2000 machine to print to the LPR printer (at the same IP as the router) and it works fine.

But the problem from the Mac--and this happens both in OS 9, OS X 10.0, and OS X 10.1, is that the first job prints fine, but then the printer's activity light keeps blinking for 5 minutes or so, until it times out. Then I can print again. Switching the printer off and on does let me print sooner, but that's hardly satisfactory.

I've played around with it quite a bit, but can't get around the problem. Since it's a PostScript printer, I assumed that the PostScript end-of-job code (ctrl-D) wasn't getting sent to the printer after each job. I tried reading up on the lpr printing daemon, and adding some scripts to intercept each job that was sent and insert a Ctrl-D into the stream at the appropriate point--I found a few documents on the web that told how to do it for linux and other unixen. But none of these seemed to be effective on OS X, even with going into NetInfo and messing with the printing settings there.

Anyone have any ideas? It seems like it ought to be a simple fix, but maybe this 3com lpr server is just not compatible with PostScript printers. (But why does it still work from Windows then?? )

--Lowell