ARM Club 3/TheARMClub_PDCD3.iso/programs/acorn/riscos2/apps1/!PrinterPS/ReadMe

Text File | 1989-01-04 | 3.7 KB | 69 lines

This is PrinterPS, version 0.83 (04-Jan-89)

Documentation on how to use PrinterPS can be found in Edition 2 of the
Archimedes User Guide.

The following remarks should be noted about this version of PrinterPS and
its documentation.

Text printing is applied to files of types Text, Command, Obey, and
PoScript. For anything else, the application checks if other applications
know how to print the file. If this fails it checks with the user whether to
print the file.

You can override the application's treatment of a particular type file by
setting system variables of the form Alias$@PrinterType_xxx, where xxx is
the appropriate type. If the variable exists, then the application performs
*@PrinterType_xxx <filename> before doing anything else. It then checks for
the existence of <Printer$Temp>. If this exists then it is printed. You can
therefore print via a print utility program by setting Alias$@PrintType_FFF
to the macro *PrintUtil <%0> -to <Printer$Temp>. If the result of this
operation is textual PostScript then you should set the type of <Printer$Temp>
to PoScript in the macro or application.

Clicking SELECT on the PrinterPS icon produces a window with data about the
current printer driver settings. Clicking on the name field steps through
the printers and page sizes enumerated in the file PrData. Manual feed can
also be selected, and simple options set that apply to text printing.

If the output is to the serial line and XON/XOFF protocols are being used
then a small module, SerialRxIgnore, is loaded and used to discard incoming
characters (except XON/XOFF control characters).

The following remarks should be noted about this version of the printer
driver module and its documentation.

For each RISC OS font used, the printer driver needs to be told which
PostScript font to use in its place. Near the end of the file
!PrinterPS.PSprolog is a list of the font translations used. This can be
added to or modified by the user as desired - usually, you should add a
suitable translation for each new font you acquire. It is a good idea to
ensure that the PostScript font you use has similar metrics to the RISC OS
font: the PostScript code used for text printing will compensate
automatically for differences between the metrics of the two fonts, but the
results are likely to be ugly if these differences are too large.

The file !PrinterPS.PSprolog also contains a PostScript encoding vector
(which says what actual character corresponds to each character code).
This has been chosen to conform with the ISO 8859-1 Latin 1 alphabet as
far as possible, though there are some ambiguities (e.g. character code
&2D is defined in the ISO standard to be hyphen or minus, which are
usually two different characters in PostScript fonts). This encoding
vector can be edited if necessary - but make sure you know what you are
doing.

Not all PostScript fonts contain all the characters in the
Latin 1 encoding vector. The PostScript code in !PrinterPS.PSprolog is
set up to ignore any character that you try to print if it doesn't
appear in the PostScript font being used. If you would prefer a PostScript
error to be generated instead, there is a documented single line change you
can make to !PrinterPS.PSprolog to achieve this effect.

Printing RISC OS sprites to PostScript is a rather complicated business and
always generates quite a lot of PostScript output. It may also take quite a
long time to print. Under some circumstances (particularly if there are a
lot of colours in the sprite and/or if the sprite is to occupy a large
amount of space on the printed page), the time taken by the printer and/or
the application to print the sprite may become quite large (of the order of
several minutes or even more). Do not worry unduly about this.