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1996-04-11
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RISC OS 3 Printer Manager !Printers (1.53) Issue 1
==================================================
Copyright © Acorn Risc Technologies, A division of Acorn Computer Group plc, 1996.
Printers 1.53 upgrade disc one contains the following:
• !!Read1st, text file
• !Printers, version 1.53, containing
• MakePSFont 1.08 (08-Aug-95)
• PDriver 3.25 (20-Feb-95)
• PDriverDP 4.39 (28-Sep-95)
• PDriverPS 4.39 (28-Sep-95)
• PDumperSpt 1.21 (11-Sep-95)
• RemPrnMsgs 1.03 (08-Aug-95)
• RemPrnSpt 1.03 (08-Aug-95)
• PDumperCX 1.18 (29-Feb-96)
• PDumperDM 1.17 (20-Sep-95)
• PDumperE2 1.17 (20-Sep-95)
• PDumperIW 1.17 (20-Sep-95)
• PDumperLJ 1.17 (20-Sep-95)
• ColourTrans 1.57
• !Scrap
• ReadMe
!Printer 1.53 upgrade disc 2 contains
• !PrintEdit, version 0.44
• Printers
• User Guide
Disclaimer
----------
The software is provided "as is"; Acorn Computers Limited ("Acorn") makes no
warranty, express or implied, of the merchantability of this software or its
fitness for any particular purpose. In no circumstance shall Acorn be liable
for any damage, loss of profits, or any indirect or consequential loss
arising out of the use of this software or inability to use this software,
even if Acorn has been advised of the possibility of such loss.
Distribution
------------
Any person or organisation wishing to make these discs available on any
public access on-line system or via public domain, careware or shareware
service should contact Customer Services at Acorn in writing at the address
at the bottom of this file for licensing details. The contents of the discs
remain copyright of Acorn Risc Technologies.
Enhanced RISC OS 3 printer manager
----------------------------------
The enhanced printer manager is designed to run on RISC OS 3.10 or later,
and requires at least 2Mbytes of RAM.
Installation
------------
Please refer to the directory 'UserGuide' supplied on disc 2 of this upgrade.
What's new?
-----------
The following changes have been made to !Printers:
Between 0.33 and 1.22/24
1. 'background' printing.
This very useful feature has been added to the printer manager. In
effect, this causes printing to be directed to a spool file for files
in the queue, after which the spool file is then sent to the printer
as a background activity. Since not all applications support queueing
of printing, this feature will not work with all applications.
Background printing is an option selectable in the 'Connection'
dialogue box.
It should be realised, however, that spooling printer data to a file can
result in very large files being created. This option should not,
therefore, be used when !Scrap lives on a floppy disc. It should be
treated as a hard-disc or network only option.
2. Improved colour printing support.
Acorn has been working in conjunction with third parties to design and
develop new ColourTrans and PDumperSupport modules. In addition to better
colour rendition at the 256 colour level, the drivers now provide support
for 24bpp colour rendition through the use of a three pass system. This
is done transparently to the application and the user. Applications which
can make use of this include Draw and Artworks. !Paint, and other similar
sprite-based packages, will not print correctly in colour using 16
million colours option. Sprites can be printed from !Draw if you want to
print using this option.
A substantial part of the colour printing flexibility comes from the use
of a printer palette file. This copy of !Printers contains a general
purpose palette file (!Printers.Palettes.0) which may not give quite as
good results as some printer drivers from third party companies which
have been produced for specific printers. New palette files can be
created using the !RePro tool available from Oak Solutions.
Note that if you *do* create your own palette file, you should save it
with a palette file number of 10000 or higher to avoid clashes with any
commercially produced palette files. You will also need to edit the
graphics modes in the printer definition file so that they refer to your
new palette file rather than palette file 0.
3. New and improved printer definition files.
We have a number of new printer definition files for colour and black &
white printers. Drivers for the Hewlett Packard Deskjet 500C, 550C and
1200C have been included; the 550C driver will also work correctly for the
Deskjet 310 colour. The BJC600 has been included as an additional PDF. New
black and white dot matrix PDF's have been included for various printers.
The Epson Stylus 800 has been included with its own PDF which will also
support the other printers in the Stylus range. The original PDF's
supplied have been improved to provide higher resolution colour printing
options. The lists of supported printers supplied within each manufacturer
directory have been significantly updated with information supplied or
verified in most cases by the manufacturers to include nearly 300 printers
in total.
4. Reduced disc swapping.
Single floppy drive users have suffered in the past from the overlaying
system employed in previous versions of the printer manager. For users of
dot matrix or Laserjet class printers, the necessity to re-insert the
printer driver disc has been removed. This should alleviate a lot of
problems for the floppy disc system users within schools. When printing to
PostScript printers it will, however, still be necessary to insert the
original printer driver disc.
5. Sensible default options.
The PDFs will now load with more popular default options selected.
Printers that print in colour will now select colour and sensible
resolution options when they are loaded thus reducing the amount of
configuration required when the printer manager is first set up.
6. PostScript printing.
Various changes have been made to PostScript printing, including
standardising the PostScript output.
7. Printing with Acorn Access.
!Printers has been updated for use with the new Acorn Access package. A
new option from the Printer Control menu allows the 'Shared' option to be
selected if Acorn Access is installed. Please refer to the Acorn Access
notes for further information.
8. New templates.
Both 2D and 3D templates are provided. Selection is dependant on the
setting of bit 1 of byte &8C in CMOS RAM. There is therefore no
requirement for the application to be updated with the sprites and
template provided by !NewLook.
9. File Output.
It is now possible, when printing to file, for subsequent output to be
appended to previous output sent to the same file.
10. Printing 'Output' files.
When printing 'Output' files created by printing with a dp class
printer, the problem whereby an address exception could occur at the end
of the print cycle has now been fixed.
11. Paper size editing.
The 'Edit Paper Size' option now selects the paper type that is
configured for that particular printer driver.
12. Cancelling a print job.
When the Escape key is used to stop a print job the printer manager will
now send a reset to the printer. It is therefore necessary to ensure that
the printer is online when escape is pressed.
13. Loading PDFs.
New PDFs loaded into the printer manager will now be automatically
installed onto the icon bar so the user does not have to specifically
make them active.
14. Look and feel.
Various changes have been made to the printer manager to make it more
Style Guide compliant, eg the removal of dbox close buttons and the
addition of 'Cancel' buttons.
15. New structure to !System.
!System has been enhanced so that it can now act as a container of
shared resources for both RISC OS 2 and RISC OS 3 applications. If
modules need to be released for specific versions of RISC OS (eg the
ColourTrans module released with this disc) then it should be placed in
the appropriate directory, ie !System.310.Modules for RISC OS 3.10 or
later, or !System.Modules for RISC OS 2. Note that if a module can be
used by all versions of the operating system, then it should continue to
be placed in !System.Modules.
Between 1.22/24 and 1.28
1. Simple modification to the Epson 'ReadMe' file on the printers disc to
include Epson Stylus Information.
2. When using !Printers with Acorn Access making a printer which is shared
across the network inactive used to cause the printer manager to crash.
3. In the Risc PC where 32,000 colour quality is available one pixel was out
of alignment. This is not noticeable to the normal eye!
4. Performing multiple prints in background mode used to cause the original file
to be deleted.
5. When printing to file and entering a pathname manually the printer manager
sometimes puts the file into the currently selected directory no matter what
you have entered as the pathname.
6. When printing A3 to the BJC800 a white stripe would appear 2/3 of the way
down the page.
7. If were accessing a shared printer (using Acorn Access) and you had specified
a paper size other than the default, the printer manager didn't use this, but
used the default size instead.
8. It was possible to for text print job to be ignored by a PostScript printer if,
a) there were no carriage returns inserted manually or automatically at the end
of lines and b) if the print job was scaled to less than 45%.
9. When printing from some software packages to some Deskjets compatibles (including
the Acorn JP150 with version 1.03 code) the text would print right against the left
side of the page ie. print margins were ignored.
10. When used on the Risc PC some characters within the configuration dialogue box were
mis-aligned.
11. A CTRL-D is no longer appended to the end of an EPSF (Encapsulated PostScript) file.
Between 1.28 and 1.28c
1. The only difference between these two versions is support for the Epson Stylus
Colour printer. There are two print modes on the Epson Stylus colour supported
by two new definition files contained in the Epson directory on upgrade disc. The
two new definition files are called 'Stylus-Col' and the second is called 'Stylus-Cmw'.
Stylus-Col
This definition file supports the standard print mode with print resolutions up to
720 x720 DPI. The default resolution selected is 360 x 360 DPI.
Stylus-Cmw
This definition file supports the MicroWeave print mode with print resolutions up to
720 x720 DPI. The default resolution selected is 360 x 360 DPI. The MicroWeave mode
seems to reduce banding quite significantly over the standard print mode.
Between 1.28c and 1.45 (1.45 Supplied in ROM on RISC OS 3.60 only)
1. Support for printing JPEG images from applications which automatically
deal with JPEG images such as !Draw.
Between 1.45 and 1.52
1. Improved printing speed for Bit image printer in both colour and black
and white print modes.
2. Support for HP EconoMode, Normal and Enhanced print options on newer
printers.
3. Specially tailored Palette files for specific printers offering improved
colour rendition.
4. Support for Epson Stylus Colour Normal and Microweave modes incorporated
into one definition file.
5. Support for new Epson Stylus printers (820, Pro, Pro XL and Colour II,
IIs)
6. PostScript Level 2 support.
7. Support for PostScript printer that have multiple bins, allowing Duplex
printing etc.
8. New Canon printers supported in extended mode offering smoothing (360 x
720) within software control. Canon extended mode also requires the
computer to use less memory when constructing the image and is quicker.
9. Simplified quality options for newer printers.
10. Printer Definition Files can be double clicked on to load them.
!Printers 1.52 Issue 2
a. Added new Canon Bubblejet PDF's
b. Added new Deskjet 400 PDF
c. Added new Epson LX-300 PDF
!Printers 1.52 Issue 3
a. Added new LasJet4-PS PDF incorporating Level 3 PostScript support and
Feeds files allowing Multi-bin access.
Between 1.52 and 1.53
1. A New version of PDumperCX to support BJC 210 and BJC 4100.
2. Fix a palette overloading problem (Problem only showed on RISC OS 3.60)
3. New palette file (12) for BJC 210 (2 ink colour modes)
4. Small Halftones re-instated, now called 'halftoned (fine)'.
5. Included PDF's for Canon BJC 210, Canon BJC 4100, Epson Stylus-Pro and
Epson Stylus Pro XL.
6. Set Printer$Path and Printer$Dir 'Set' line to the !Run file.
Feedback
--------
If you experience any problems please contact us, preferably in writing, at the
address below with the following details:
• Printer being used.
• Version of firmware fitted to the printer.
• If the printer is Laserjet or PostScript, how much memory is installed in
the printer.
• Which Acorn computer system is being used.
• Full description of the problem including, preferably, a copy of the
!Printer application, on disc, that is causing the problems.
Please send these details to Technical Support at Acorn Risc Technologies.
ACORN and the ACORN logo are trademarks of Acorn Computers Ltd.
PostScript is a trademark of Adobe Systems Inc.
LaserWriter is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc.
HP and LaserJet are trademarks of Hewlett Packard Corporation.
Citizen is a trademark of Citizen Watch Co. Ltd. Japan
Epson FX,LQ and MX are trademarks of Seiko Epson Corp.
Star and LC10 are trademarks of Star Micronics Co. Ltd
IBM and IBM Proprinter are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.
All other trademarks are acknowledged.