The lost art (Was: The VAX is running

[Ethan Dicks]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
>> > I fired one who was unable to write a program to print 3-up mailing labels
>> > because the printer didn't have a reverse line-feed!
>
> On Mon, 6 Apr 2009, Alexandre Souza wrote:
>>     REVERSE LINE FEED? Never heard of that. What is a 3-up mailing label?
>> That perforated roll of three mailing labels per line? I can do that in
>> BASIC with just one of the hands.
>
> Yep.
> He was able to print one column of labels, with a \n at the end of each
> line, and then was stuck because he couldn't make the printer go back up
> to the top of the page again!

I think I wrote something like that in C for VMS about 20 years ago
(without the backing up ;-).  When I most recently did it (last year),
it was much easier - I wrote a Perl script to emit Postscript,
rendered each label in order and let the Postscript rendering engine
worry about the details.

But yes... one should be able to write it when it has to be one
physical line at a time, no backsies.

-ethan