EE171 EE171 Electrical Engineering Department
Portland State University
Portland, OR

Mentor Printing

To Initialize printing in Mentor a.4-f:

go to the toolbar at the top of the session window and use the right mouse button to select MGC > SETUP > PRINTER ...

you should see a box titled "Setup Printer - General" ... use the left mouse button to highlight the desired printer ... the only names I'd recommend trusting right now are lw7 and lw10 ... these are in the Circuits Lab and the Sun Lab respectively ...

once you have highlighted the printer you seek to print to, click the window button labeled "Select Printer" with the left mouse button .. the desired printer should appear in the window immediately beneath the window button

[Note that there a set of controls that can be used to modify or adjust the print job. Leave these at the default settings initially for printing the schematic for the EEx71 projects. For the "Trace" printouts from QuickSim, there is a method that will get you guarranteed results and minimize the paper wastage and frustration. For the "List" printout, note that mentor A.4-F is broken and a method will be described that works reliably.]

Click "OK" with the left mouse button. This will also close the window.

To print from Mentor A.4-F(in general):

Make sure the window you are printing from is active(high-lighted).

If you haven't already initialized printing for the tool or session, please do so, then go back to the toolbar and again use the right mouse button to select FILE > PRINT(whatever) and complete whatever other transactions required by the tool or session.

If rather than a nice neat printout you get a bunch of pages with a few lines of character at the top, open an xterm and do "lpq -Plwxx" where xx is the printer you sent the print job to. You are welcome to take the printer off-line to avoid eating more paper. Just be sure to put the printer back on-line later.

You'll see something like the above if you take the printer offline, else if the job is printing you see something like this:

you can kill your own printing job with the "lprm" command

If you find that someone has left a dead job on the printer, please contact "support@cat.pdx.edu" or come to FAB 60-02 and tell us.

If you did take the printer offline, once you have killed off your job, please put the printer back online.

These are PostScript printers. There is a filter taht checks to make sure the job is postscript, and if the filter can tell it's a postscript job, all is well, otherwise it'll send the job through yet another filter that converts what the first filter believes is ASCII text to proper postscript. Part of the setup process you have to do makes sure that Mentor understands how you want the file you send to the printer to look. Earlier versions of Mentor were even more convoluted, and some configurations may have been easier on the user, but harder on the systems and network. It was not unusual under an earlier version of mentor and our operating system(then, Sunos4.1.4) to have print jobs just simply disappear...

Do *not* send the job again if it doesn't come out fairly quickly. If the job does not come out within a few moments, use the lpq command to see if the printer is stuck or busy. Labview jobs can cause the printer to spend a lot of time building the image. Sometimes, print files that are broken or badly formed can hang the printer. If you see what you think is a problem please contact support(CAT), and we can usually clear up the problem quickly. If you cannot wait for the printout, please use lprm to kill your print job. Whether you collect it or not, whether do the prinout correctly or not, you still get billed for the pages consumed. This is the EE department's way of encouraging folks to learn how to print.

To print the schematic:

Make sure the window you are printing from is active(high-lighted).

If you haven't already initialized printing for the "Design Architect" session, please do so, then go back to the toolbar and again use the right mouse button to select FILE > PRINT SHEET ... A small task window will appear below to verify your choice of printer. If acceptable, click "OK" with the left mouse button.

If rather than a nice neat schematic you get a bunch of pages with a few lines of character at the top, open an xterm and do "lpq -Plwxx" where xx is the printer you sent the print job to. You are welcome to take the printer off-line to avoid eating more paper. Just be sure to put the printer back on-line later. Deal with the situation as described earlier in this document, or ask for help. Again, you're paying for the pages that come out of the printer.

To print the "Trace" or timing diagram:

WARNING: Each time you wish to print a sheet of the "trace" go through the initialization sequence. Mentor A.4-F QuickSim tends to crash otherwise.

Follow these steps to get you started. Feel free to experiment and explore with other methods, you may find a better way to do this. This works consistently, however.

Initialize printing in Mentor a.4-f QuickSim II:
- go to the toolbar at the top of the session window and use the right mouse button to select MGC > SETUP > PRINTER ...
- you should see a box titled "Setup Printer - General" ... use the left mouse button to highlight the desired printer
- once you have highlighted the printer you seek to print to, click the window button labeled "Select Printer" with the left mouse button .. the desired printer should appear in the window immediately beneath the window button
- Select "OK" with the left mouse button
each additional time you wish to print "Trace" repeat 1.A and 1.D(assuming you are using the same printer) ... failure to do so may cause the Qsim session to crash, and eventually will. The failure is seldom recoverable.
Use the right mouse button to select from the toolbar FILE > PRINT > ACTIVE WINDOW ... this will bring up the "print traces" window ... Print/plot should be selected, the printer name should be shown ... domain refers to the timescale shown at the bottom the the trace window, you can specify a begin and end time, and that time interval what will be printed out ... note that you must give it a range, or nothing will be printed out... the suggestion here is to print out all or most of the desired time range to get a sense of scale, then you can select the parts of the range you want to see ... varying the intervals can also be used to change how this will look ... again, experiment ... part of the process is to learn how the parts of the tools interact ... {note to Craig: should we include samples? or can we trust my descriptions?}

To print the "List":

You can't do this from Mentor A.4-F directly, near as I know... this is supposed to be fixed in later versions
If you haven't already initialized printing for the "QuickSim II"" session, please do so,
then go back to the toolbar and again use the right mouse button to select FILE > WRITE ... A window will appear to ask for a pathname. A pathname is a file name, either an absolute path from the default reference for the diskspace your user account lives on, or from the default directory reference you gave as you were starting up mentor, normally your homedir, or your mentor subdirectory if you used one. Do you remember using "setenv MGC_WD /u/username/"??? That's the default directory... add a filename and that makes the pathname for that file. If I ask it to use the name "list-one", then the pathname will be "/u/username/list-one"
for the begin time and end time, give the begin and end times for the run, or if you only want part, the specify that range with the appropriate start and stop times... experiment!!!
hit "OK" to save -- this is saved as an ASCII file...
to view the file, either open another xterm and use your favorite text editor or browser, or, within mentor use notepad... myself, I usually import it into Interleaf and clean it up and add notes and comments. You can print it from notepad, or whatever editor/browser you chose to use that is equipped to print. Be sure to make sure whatever you hand in is reasonable.