Howard Oakley
The story of Rip Van Winkle probably saved author Washington Irving from bankruptcy, but it was hardly original. The German folk tale Peter Klaus, the Jewish equivalent about Honi M’agel and the Chinese legend of Ranka all hinge on unnaturally long periods of sleep, and the consequences of waking up years into the future.
For those who install the latest Mac OS X updates within a few hours of release, it’s a salutary experience upgrading in large leaps the Macs of others: in my case, from Mac OS X 10.3.x and Adobe CS up to a mixture of 10.5.8 and 10.6.3 with CS4. The job was simple – a word that so often seems to presage my tales of woe. I had next to no time to replace two working PowerPC iMacs with two new Intel models, and drag one of those old iMacs screaming and kicking up to Leopard, to play nice with the Snow Leopards.
To everyone else’s credit, much of it went seamlessly. Getting the three systems to print duplex to their original Lexmark printer was the unexpected nightmare, though. First, the network admin’s claim that I only had to plug in the Macs for them to work proved illusory. Checking the old iMacs revealed that neither could find the purported DHCP server, so had self-assigned IP addresses, while the printer sat with an address set to 0.0.0.0. Of course, the old systems happily chatted to it using AppleTalk, not an option in Snow Leopard.
I set the Macs and printer to fixed IP addresses. Now programs printed, the green light on the printer flashing enticingly, before aborting, paper untouched. The printer needed a Gateway address set, and plugging that in through its menu hierarchy enabled it to spit out pages whenever I instructed. Every application except InDesign CS4 was then happy to dance duplex, and completion seemed tantalisingly close.
Adobe’s aversion to standard print dialogs has long irritated me, and in the next hours it was to become maddening. Despite having a supported printer with a widely used duplex option, Adobe’s own efforts at the Print dialog didn’t even offer the option. If I ignored the warnings and entered the more usual print dialog (via the Printer… button), I could make up a double-sided print preset – which Adobe’s dialog ignored.
After a few minutes of searching support sites, I stumbled across tirades of disappointed users who had encountered the same problem. My heart sank when some of them were still printing single-sided after trying every suggestion. Indeed, others just gave up and exported to PDF, resorting to Acrobat or Preview to talk more respectfully to their printers. Armed with suggestions, I went back to my little band of iMacs ready for the worst, having to explain to their users how the huge improvements in CS4 didn’t quite reach the problem of printing prudently.
My final battle with InDesign CS4 opened with a quick tweak in Cups to make the Lexmark printer default to duplex, but this made no impression. It was not until I changed the page size to read ‘Defined By Driver’ that the duplex mechanism burst into action and my campaign was won. I was left struggling to get my head around how setting a page size to be that defined by the driver could possibly be synonymous with ‘duplex’.
My Rip Van Winkles were ready to waken, and be handed back to their users.
