Technical data

• Monitors printer progress
• Reports printer status
• Handles exceptions
For example, suppose a user issues the following PRINT command:
$ PRINT/QUEUE=POST3/NOTIFY THORNTON.TXT
The PRINT command line is translated to system service calls, which are sent
to the job controller. The calls are converted to job controller data structures,
which are then passed to the symbiont for processing. The symbiont sends
the processed arguments and file data to the printer and notifies the user by
displaying messages about the status of the print job.
See the DECprint Supervisor for OpenVMS User’s Guide for information about
the PRINT command and its qualifiers.
1.2.2 Device Control Libraries
A device control library is an OpenVMS text library that contains setup
modules. The symbiont uses modules from the device control library to
implement the various PRINT parameters. The DECprint Supervisor software
extracts the appropriate module, depending on the qualifier that either appears
on the PRINT command line or is associated with a print queue, and inserts
the module into the data stream.
The device control library also contains modules that the symbiont does not
automatically use. Some of these modules contain PostScript procedures, for
example, to include an error handler in a print job or to extend the findfont
procedure to recognize alternate character encodings. These are described in
the DECprint Supervisor for OpenVMS User’s Guide.
You can create setup modules to be used on your own systems. When you
create setup modules, you must store them in a device control library other
than the DCPS$DEVCTL library. Create a device control library as described
in Chapter 7 and add your library to the device control library search list
defined in DCPS$STARTUP.COM.
When you create a site-specific device control library for your custom setup
modules, the contents of your library are retained from one version of the
DECprint Supervisor software to the next. The standard device control library,
DCPS$DEVCTL, is overwritten when you upgrade from one version of the
software to the next.
DECprint Supervisor Overview 1–5