ARM Club 3/TheARMClub_PDCD3.iso/hensa/printing/nup_2/!NUp/!Help

Text File | 1997-12-19 | 12KB | 317 lines

!Help file for !NUp


License
=======

The copyright to this application, NUp, is retained by the author, Simon
Melhuish. NUp may be copied freely for non-commercial use. Copies may be
passed to a third party, for non-commercial use, so long as no charge is
made, all files, including this one, are included, and the software and
documentation are not altered in any way. You may not upload NUp to any kind
of bulletin board system, or similar, without the express permission of the
author, although you are free to distribute copies on a one-to-one basis by
electronic mail systems. “Public domain” libraries are not permitted to
distribute NUp without the express permission of the author. Anyone wishing
to include NUp in a CD compilation, or similar, is required to contact me for
permission. Newer versions of the software and/or the documentation may be
made available at a future date.

I reserve the right to change the above conditions, or to withdraw or revoke
this licence in relation to any or all users at any time and for any reason.

NUp comes with absolutely no warranty. I accept no responsibilty for any
problems you might think are related to the use of this software. You use it
entirely at your own risk.


Description
===========

NUp stands for N-Up printing. It is a utility application that allows several
drawfiles to be printed on a single page. Other file types may be loaded
using a system of helper applications.


Minimum requirements
======= ============

NUp should run on a 1 MB machine, with RISC OS 3.1 or later. NUp itself takes
only 48 kB of memory. The toolbox modules are quite big though. You will need
enough free memory in addition to allow for the size of your drawfiles, plus
some for helper applications for other file types.


Running NUp
======= ===

Run NUp by double clicking its icon in a filer window. The NUp icon should
now appear on the iconbar. If it doesn't you'll probably see an error box
telling you to run the !Printers application first. NUp needs to ask Printers
about page sizes, etc, so you must have it running.

NUp will refuse to run if another copy is already running.

The text under the iconbar icon shows two numbers. The first is the number of
panels on the page currently filled by drawfiles. At the start this will of
course read '0'. The second number is the number of panels per page. The
value depends upon how you have NUp set up.


Interactive help
=========== ====

NUp fully supports interactive help. Run a help application (e.g the RISC OS
3 !Help application). You will now be provided with help on the NUp iconbar
icon, all the NUp windows and the NUp menu.


Loading drawfiles
======= =========

To load a drawfile into NUp drag its icon onto the NUp icon on the iconbar.
The NUp main window will now open, with your drawfile loaded into one of the
panels on the page. Should you close the main window you can re-open it at
any time by select-clicking the NUp iconbar icon. You may drag more than one
file to NUp (the iconbar icon or the main window if it is open). For each
drawfile loaded the loaded panel count will increment by one. Note that you
can have more panels loaded than fit one one page. For files not currently
displayed only the filename is kept by NUp, to reduce memory requirements. Be
sure not to delete files dragged onto NUp but not yet displayed.


Loading other file types
======= ===== ==== =====

NUp loads drawfiles only. However, it can automatically convert certain
file types to draw format (the converted files will be held in the !Scrap
application - the original files are preserved). This works by using "helper"
applications. Currently these can handle text, sprites and most of the
formats acceptable to ChangeFSI. For the latter, you must ensure that
ChangeFSI has been booted (or "seen" by the filer). Some of these conversions
require several steps, and so are not especially fast.


Loading directories
======= ===========

When a directory is dropped onto NUp it will iterate through its contents.
Subdirectories will be scanned recursively. If there are files not handled by
NUp or its helpers they will be ignored without any error message. Image
filing systems (e.g SparkFS archives, x-files, etc) are treated as if they
were normal directories.


The NUp menu
=== === ====

Clicking the menu button over the NUp iconbar icon or the main window pops up
the NUp menu. This has entries for program info, options, scaling, flushing,
printing and quiting NUp.


Changing the setup
======== === =====

To change NUp's setup select the "Options..." entry on the NUp menu. The
"Layout Options" dialogue box thus revealed allows you to set the page
orientation (landscape or portrait), the page size, the number of panels
across and down, and automatic page printing and flushing.

Normally you would leave the page size set to "Printer size". However, if you
have special requirements, e.g to fit the NUp panels to a sheet of sticky
labels, you might want to define a "Custom size". Click the radio button, and
the custom dimension entries will become writeable. The values are all in mm.
The width and height are the page size _including_ margins. The margins are
all _inwards_ from the edge of the page. However, negative margin values are
allowed.

When you are happy with the setup click "Set". If you want to revert to the
old setup click "Cancel". If you want to preserve the setup for the next time
NUp is run click "Save".


Printing
========

When you want to print the page displayed in the main window, even if it is
not full, select "Print..." from the NUp menu. This will pop up a dialogue
box showing the currently selected printer and the number of copies the
print. You may change the latter by entering a number or clicking the up or
down bump icons.

When you are satisfied click "Print". Click "Cancel" to cancel the print
operation.

You you want to set the number of copies only, for a future (automatic) print
operation, set the number and click "Print" with _no_ files loaded.


Flushing Panels
======== ======

There are two menu entries for flushing (clearing) panels. "Flush all" clears
all currently loaded drawfiles from NUp. "Flush page" clears only the panels
displayed in the main window. If there were more than a pageful of drawfiles
loaded the next pageful will now be displayed in the main window.


"Auto print" and "Auto flush"
============ === ============

These two options in the setup dialogue govern the automatic printing and
flushing of the main window. With "Auto print" selected the page will be
printed automatically as soon as it is filled. With "Auto flush" selected the
page will be flushed automatically after it is printed. If you have a large
number of files to print you can select both these options, so that when you
drag them to NUp pages will be filled and printed automatically. There might
be an unfilled page left at the end, in which case you will have to select
"Print..." manually.


Scaling
=======

The "Scale" menu entry leads to a "Scale view" dialogue box. This has buttons
to set the scaling to any of various preset values, or you can enter your
desired value directly. There is a "Scale to fit" button, which will select
the best scaling to fit the window to the current screen mode. Click on
"Scale" when you are happy with the setting, or "Cancel" to use the old
value.

Note that the size of the printed version is not affected by this scale
factor.


Advanced setup
======== =====

If you are familiar with the operation of system aliases you might like to
use your boot sequence, etc, to redefine the way that NUp calls its helper
applications. If you look at !NUp.!Run you will see lines defining aliases of
the form Alias$NUpHelper_xxx, where xxx is the filetype. Redefining any of
these after NUp has loaded will affect the conversion of any files of that
type subsequently loaded.

For instance, you might enter the line:
  Set Alias$NUpHelper_fff <NUp$Dir>.helpers.Txt2NUp %%0 Trinity.Medium 20
This would change the font used for text files.

If you like, you can change the aliases completely, to point to your own
helper applications.


Helper applications
====== ============

The supplied helper applications can be found in !NUp.helpers
These support the conversion of text to draw, sprite to draw, and other
bitmap types to draw, via sprites.

The operation is fairly simple. When a non-draw file is dragged onto NUp, it
checks to see if an alias is defined. If it is, it executes the alias. It is
then the responsibility of the helper application, run by the alias, to load
the file, convert it to draw format and save it to the NUp application. NUp
sees this just as another draw file and loads it through the normal
mechanism. However, NUp has to keep track of which file has a helper running.
It will queue demands for helpers until the previous one has completed. This
is because some filetypes (i.e sprite and text) can result in more than one
output file (one per sprite image or one per page). To tell NUp when it has
finished with a file the helper application must send a NUpHelperDyingMessage
(0x4f441 - registered) message to NUp. The data part of this message is the
name of the input file. In fact this is optional, but if not present the
first byte of the data part must be 0. A trivial application in the helpers
directory (!NUp.helpers.nupobit) performs this task.


Controlling NUp remotely
=========== === ========

The task for which I originally wrote NUp was to handle draw files produced
automatically by another application. To fully automate everything it became
apparent that I should add a facility for this application (or any other) to
take control of NUp's setup, etc. This is done using the wimp message
NUpControlMessage (0x4f440 - registered). The format of the data block is
non-trivial, and possibly subject to change; so I won't describe it here.
However, I have provided an application in the helpers directory called
"nupcont". Running this will send control messages to NUp (make sure NUp is
running first).

The switches to nupcont to set the type of control message are:

  f    flush page

  F    flush all

  p    print
           c N  after 'p' sets number of copies to N
         e.g nupcont -pc 4
           prints 4 copies

  o    set options
         parameters (compulsary) are:
           x y landscape auto_print auto_flush
         e.g nupcont -o 2 2 1 0 1
           2 by 2, landscape, auto print off, auto flush on

  c    custom page size
         parameters (compulsary) are (unit is 0.1 mm):
           lmarg bmarg rmrg tmarg width height

  d    use default page size


Tips
====

If NUp gets stuck waiting for a helper that failed (e.g a JPEG that ChangeFSI
didn't understand) you can get it going again by doing a "flush".

If a file does not load due to lack of memory (i.e if you get this message:
"Memory could not be allocated for the new diagram") once you have freed
enough memory (by closing other applications, etc) NUp can be forced to have
another go at loading the file by either clicking on a printer icon, or
clicking "Set" in the "Layout Options" dialogue.


Problems
========

At present I am not aware of any bugs. Please see below for contact details
if you find any.

Be sure to have !Printers running before trying to run NUp.

If any of Acorn's toolbox modules (toolbox, window, drwafile, etc) were not
supplied with this distribution you will find them on Acorn's FTP site.


Contacting the author
========== === ======

I am currently contactable for suggestions, bug reports, flattery, etc, at:

[e-mail]

or

[e-mail]

Or by post as:

Dr. Simon J. Melhuish,
N.R.A.L.,
Jodrell Bank,
Macclesfield,
Cheshire.
SK11 9DL


You might like to visit my home page:
http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~sjm/
where you will find information about me, and Jodrell Bank's work on the
Cosmic Microwave Background.

My software page can now be access from the ProgInfo box off the iconbar
menu. With your web browser loaded, click on "Web site".