Troubleshooting Techniques
When debugging printer problems, including those relating to problems in your printer ini files, there are two general-purpose troubleshooting techniques that you should familiarize yourself with.
Tracing
This technique applies under all A-Shell environments, and consists of activating "line printer trace mode". You can do this from the A-Shell command prompt (aka "dot prompt") as follows:
.SET TRACE LP ON
Or, you can activate it in miame.ini by adding TRACE=LP anywhere after the first line of the file, typically near the bottom.
When line printer tracing is active, each time you print something, you will see a bunch of debugging information displayed on your screen which, hopefully, may help you identify the problem. Note that since most such problems are not specific to the particular print file, you would typically just use the PRINT.LIT command to print a sample file. A good sample file to print is the printer ini file itself, e.g.:
.PRINT LASER1=ASHCFG:LASER1.PQI
After resolving the problem, you can turn line printer tracing off with:
.SET TRACE LP OFF
There are several other trace options. See the information for TRACE or for SET.LIT. Or just type SET TRACE from the dot prompt to get a list of the status of the currently available tracing options.
SPOOL.LOG
The second general-purpose printer troubleshooting technique applies only to Unix and consists of a file opr:spool.log which logs information about every print request. Along with the time, date, and various information identifying the user, file, program, etc., it contains the actual Unix print request command and any response (error message or acknowledgement) returned by the command. This often makes simple errors (like "destination unknown") as well as much more subtle ones, which might otherwise take hours of debugging, immediately obvious.
