Print Server Sends a Continuous Stream of Formfeeds to Printer (195746)

SYMPTOMS

Under certain conditions, the status of a print server session may stay as "spooling" after a print job should have completed. When this is happening, the status of the print job in the Windows NT printer queue may also stay at spooling, while the size of the spool file keeps increasing. Under other conditions, the printing device may eject an endless stream of blank pages until the SNA Server print session is stopped and the print job is purged from the print queue.

CAUSE

This problem can occur if the following conditions are true:

An SCS code has set the top margin of the print job to a value greater than 1.
The last printable character in the host print job is a formfeed (0x0C).

Normally, if the last printable character in a print job is a formfeed, SNA Print Server will not flush it to the printer, because the Windows NT printer will eject the page anyway. Otherwise, there would be an extra formfeed at the end of the job, resulting in a blank page being ejected. However, if the top margin on the job has been altered, SNA Print Server does some additional processing when a formfeed is encountered, in order to prepare to print the next character in the proper position on the next page. A problem with this additional processing was causing a continuous stream of formfeed characters to be sent to the printer.

RESOLUTION

SNA Server 3.0

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for SNA Server version 3.0. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

184307 How to Obtain the Latest SNA Server Version 3.0 Service Pack

SNA Server 4.0

This problem was corrected in the latest Microsoft SNA Server version 4.0 U.S. Service Pack. For information on obtaining this Service Pack, query on the following word in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (without the spaces):

   S E R V P A C K

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, a formfeed character is not needed at the end of a print job when printing through SNA Server. If this character is removed, the problem will not occur. Additionally, if a Set Vertical Format SCS code at the beginning of the print job sets the top margin to 1, or does not set the top margin at all, this problem will not occur.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in SNA Server version 3.0 3.0 Service Pack 1, 3.0 Service Pack 2, 3.0 Service Pack 3, 4.0, and 4.0 Service Pack 1. This problem was first corrected in SNA Server 3.0 Service Pack 4.