October Windows 98 Shareware

A selection of high-quality printer tools and utilities.

By David Nourse

I'd be very happy to hear from readers about any topics that they would like to see covered in this column -- just drop me a line care of workshop@acp.com.au or APC Workshop, PO Box 37, Sydney NSW 102

This program's title describes exactly what it does: it's a well-designed, compact application for producing a wide range of graph papers to very precise specifications. You can also use it to print music paper for virtually any requirements.

The paper styles available include various mathematical and engineering formats, ranging from common types like Cartesian and polar plots to real exotica like the Weibull plots used for plotting reliability data. There are papers available for professions as diverse as architecture and geography (axonometric perspective and Mercator scale), and even a couple which could be useful to game-players (hexagonal and bee-cell plots).

You can set every conceivable feature of your graph paper: line colour and thickness, vertical or horizontal centring on the page, margins and the exact scaling of your plots. There's an onscreen preview, which you can manipulate with the mouse to adjust size and margins, and for bigger graphs you can adjust the pitch of the A4 output for enlargement onto A3 paper.

Graph Paper Printer should be a godsend for anybody who needs to do manual graphing or transcribe music -- it's convenient, it produces custom papers that would be otherwise unobtainable, and it could save you money. Not bad for a small piece of freeware!

FinePrint's setup options include a very wide range of paper sizes, margin setting, borders and page ordering, and there's a handy page layout preview. On A4 paper you can print four logical pages per physical page without needing a microscope, saving a lot of trees. I can't, however, see FinePrint's eight-fold reduction being suited for anything but archival purposes .You can make further paper savings through FinePrint's support for double-sided printing.

Although FinePrint's paper-saving potential is its major selling point, it has other useful features. Documents can be printed as booklets, or customised with watermarks, headers and footers, which can also be used to create your own stationery. FinePrint's FormFactory allows you to save jobs as forms and call them up when needed, to be combined with input from another print job -- heavy forms users would probably be better served by a dedicated forms generator, but it's good for occasional use.

FinePrint should prove invaluable to anybody struggling to achieve the paperless office, at home or in a corporate setting. Whether you're inundated with source code or grappling with those lengthy PDF manuals beloved of software vendors, this one's for you.

In default mode, PrintKey presents a comprehensive dialog, incorporating a display of the target screen and offering a heap of options. You can send the whole desktop, a rectangular selection, the active window or its client area to the printer, store them on the clipboard or save them to disk in a variety of formats; you can also define hotkeys for any or all of these actions.

Picture options include adjustments to colour balance, brightness, contrast and saturation; basic image-processing options include grayscaling, sharpening, blurring and embossing, changing colour depth and resizing the image. An external image editor can be called up if you want further refinements. Printer options include printer selection, picture size (as a proportion of the page) and alignment, and text footers -- date and time, user/system information or your own text.

PrintKey is an extremely useful addition to the toolkit of any user working with screen images, and you can't beat the price.

An attractive interface allows you to load and preview pictures, input them directly from a scanning device, modify them and save your modifications, and set a wide range of options for your posters. If your printer's good enough, you can even print sheets of passport photos of any desired size.

The picture modification features are limited to those you're likely to find useful in making posters: you can adjust brightness and contrast, rotate, mirror or invert an image and cut a rectangular selection for printing. The poster options include leaving edges for glue, inserting cut lines and instruction labels to help you put the whole thing together, setting very precise paper sizes and defining the size of the finished product. I found that four A4 pages creates quite an attractive poster from a 400 by 600 JPEG image, so if you have a large image, a good printer and a lot of patience, a really big poster should be feasible.

My only (small) gripe about Poster-Printery is that the English version still bears more than a few traces of its German origins -- apart from a few mistakes in the help file, the program's tool-tips pop up untranslated. It's a small fault in what's otherwise a well-designed application that should provide some very interesting adornments for home and workplace -- and could cost you a small fortune if your kids try it with a colour printer!

The n-up printing function offers several useful options, including setting the number of logical pages per physical page, page margins and orientation, and allowing you to print borders around the logical pages. You can also set the font, but due to the limitations of PostScript you're restricted to monospaced fonts like Courier.

It's possible to extend the n-up printing function to output from most Windows applications by setting up a properly configured PostScript printer writer to send its output to file. It's a bit fiddly and doesn't always work, but it's worth trying if you're keen to save paper.

Pretty-printing is a useful option for programmers who want to make source code printouts more readable. You can create a text file to identify keywords and comments and set a printing style to make them stand out (for example, printing all keywords in boldface). PrintFile includes a sample file that covers code written in C, C++, Java, Pascal and Perl.

While having a PostScript printer is the easiest way to take advantage of PrintFile's features, you can use a non-PostScript printer by taking advantage of PrintFile's ability to direct its output to a PostScript conversion program such as GhostScript -- but note that you'll need a good knowledge of the command-line parameters required by the converter.

PrintFile has more tricks up its sleeve: for example, you can give it a shortcut on Windows' Send To menu, or you can set it up as a print spooler for any file sent to a specified directory (useful for a PC network). This wide range of useful printing functions, coupled with very good documentation, make PrintFile a must for experienced users who want to get the most out of their printers.