Patches & Support files - September '97

Updates and fixes from this month's Bug Patrol Column

Rose Vines provides bugs, fixes, anomalies and workarounds for your favourite applications.

Selection behaviour
Paint Shop Pro 4 is a great upgrade from version 3, with dozens of improvements and enhancements such as gradient fills, drop shadows, automatic button creation and a grab-bag of other features.

Some of the improvements can be confusing if you're used to version 3, and you may think that some of the old features are 'broken'. For example, the selection marquee (the animated dotted line around selections) behaves in an entirely different fashion and takes some getting used to.

In Paint Shop Pro 4 you can work with discontinuous selections. To change the shape of a selection, instead of using the Selection Adjustment tool used in PSP 3, PSP 4 gives you much greater control. You can subtract from a selection by holding down the Ctrl key and dragging a new, adjoining selection; where the two selections intersect, the original selection will be cut out. Similarly, you can add to a selection by holding down the Shift key and dragging to create a new adjoining selection.

Another way in which selections behave differently is in creating text. You'll find it's easy to delete text accidentally when you're not accustomed to the new behaviour. To ensure you don't lose text, once you've created it, drag it to the desired position in the image, then open the Selections menu and choose Select None. This will position the text and remove the selection marquee.

Apart from the new behaviour, there is also a bug to look out for. If you find that the selection marquee is invisible or appears to take a long time to display, it may be because you have an early version of the file mfc42.dll. Paint Shop Pro 4.12 requires version 4.2.6256 of this file or higher. Perversely, some versions of this file misreport their version number, preventing the Paint Shop Pro installing program from overwriting the file.

If you appear to have a missing or sluggish selection marquee, you can grab the correct version of mfc42.dll from Jasc's Web site (www.jasc.com/support.html) or get it directly from this month's PC User Offline CD-ROM. You need to download and save the DLL file from into the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder (for Windows 95) or the \WINNT\SYSTEM32 folder (for Windows NT 4).

Installation folder names
Don't try to install any of the Microsoft Office 97 applications to a folder whose name contains a comma, single quote or exclamation point. It's quite likely to spit the dummy. Make sure you install onto to a folder that uses letters, numbers and spaces in the name.

In fact, you'll do well to let any program (from any company, not just Microsoft) install to the default folder unless you have a good reason for choosing another folder (such as not enough space on your C: drive). It's surprising how many programs don't work fully when you install them to a non-default folder. Even if they work perfectly, you may find you have more work to do when it comes to file operations as many programs use default folders for opening and closing files.

While it's not mandatory to use the default folder, it's often a good idea.

Printing to HP660
If you're using version 1.1 of Corel Print House in combination with a Hewlett-Packard 660C or 660CSE, you may come across the error "runtime error . . . unexpected heap error".

You can fix this by getting version 8 (or higher -- the current release is version 9) of the 660C printer drivers from www.hp.com/cposupport/printers/software/dj149en.exe.html or from the PC User Offline CD-ROM.

Word document incompatibilities
When Microsoft brought out Office 97 and Word 97, there were howls from existing users, as the company created new file formats for all the applications which were not backwards compatible. So, if you saved a Word document, for example, in Word 97 and then gave it to a colleague who had Word 95, they couldn't read it.

Word came with a clunky Save As... Word 95/6.0 option, but this was a hasty workaround. Instead of creating a true Word 95 document, it created an RTF (rich text format) file with a fake 'doc' extension.

While the RTF format could save much of the original formatting, it's a string-and-chewing gum solution which has, justifiably, failed to satisfy Word users.

Microsoft has now released a Word 95/6.0 converter which converts Word 97 docs into proper binary Word 95 docs. There are some features of Word 97 documents which will still not be converted, simply because some of the new advanced features are not supported in the older version. But with this converter, you'll be able to share documents happily with others using earlier versions of Word. We've included the converter on this month's PC User CD-ROM.

Microsoft is also including the converter in the Office 97 Service Pack 1, which should be available from www.microsoft.com/office by the time you read this. The Service Pack includes a number of fixes and minor extensions to the Office applications in addition to the Word document converter.

For full installation instructions view the read me file, but essentially you will need to copy the patch archive to your Word Pro folder, and execute it from the DOS prompt by typing LWPFIX -d -o.

Previous PC User Offline CD's

Patches and Support files - September '97

Patches and Support files - August '97

Patches and Support files - July '97

Patches and Support files - June '97

Patches and Support files - May '97

Patches and Support files - April '97

Patches and Support files - March '97