Trickle Time - Printronix P7000 User Manual

Chapter 4
HOST INTERFACE - P7000HD
TOF Action
•
Reset (default). A form feed is performed before a warm start when the
prime signal is asserted from the host. This setting is used only if the
prime signal parameter is enabled.
•
Do Nothing. Nothing occurs before a warm start when the prime signal is
asserted from the host.
Buffer Size in K
Configures the amount of memory allocated for the Centronics parallel port
buffer. You can specify between 1 and 16 Kbytes, in 1-Kbyte increments.
The default is 16K.
Auto Trickle
Auto Trickle is used to prevent a host computer from timing out because the
parallel interface was busy for too long. When Auto Trickle is enabled and the
printer's buffers are almost full, the printer will begin to trickle data in (at the
rate set in the Trickle Time menu) until the buffers start to empty out.

Trickle Time

When the printer is printing data from a host and a second job is received by
the printer from a different host, Trickle Time prevents the second host from
timing out while it is waiting for its data to be printed. In order to support this
feature, the port has to be able to accept data from the host and store it for
future use.
For example, if the printer is printing a job from the serial port, and then
receives a second print job from the parallel port, the data from the parallel
port will "trickle" bit by bit into the printer buffer to prevent a timeout error from
being sent back to the host connected to the parallel port.
The selected value is the time that the printer waits before getting the next
byte of data from the host. The Trickle Time value should be less than the
host time out value, but not too much shorter or else the printer fills up its
buffer too fast. This function is not applicable for C/T hotport.
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