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COPYRIGHT ========= This program copyright 1993 by Wolf Faust. All rights reserved. This product is subject to propriety rights. Installer and Installer project icon (c) Copyright 1991-93 Commodore-Amiga, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced and distributed under license from Commodore. More (c) Copyright 1986-93 Commodore-Amiga, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced and distributed under license from Commodore. DISCLAIMER ========== THE DRIVER HAS BEEN PROVIDED TO YOU STRICTLY 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. IN NO EVENT SHALL STAR MICRONICS OR FAUST BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF ANY ACTION, FROM WHATEVER SOURCE, CONCERNING THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE DRIVER. SAVE IN RESPECT OF DEATH OR INJURY ARISING OUT OF THE NEGLIGENCE OF STAR MICRONICS OR FAUST. INSTALLER SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS-IS" AND SUBJECT TO CHANGE; NO WARRANTIES ARE MADE. ALL USE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. NO LIABILITY OR RESPONSIBILITY IS ASSUMED. THE More PROGRAM IS PROVIDED "AS-IS" AND SUBJECT TO CHANGE; NO WARRANTIES ARE MADE. ALL USE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. NO LIABILITY OR RESPONSIBILITY IS ASSUMED. Trademarks ========== Amiga is a registered trademark of Commodore-Amiga, Inc.; All other trademarked products and company names used herein are used for identification purposes only. No infringement of trademarks is intended. Trademarks remain the property of the trademark holder. Welcome to the Star Driver ========================== The Star driver is a software for controlling a printer with the Commodore-Amiga personal computer with the purpose of creating high quality output. The driver's main qualities include: o Freely definable dither routines (many are included). o 16-point colour adjustment for each colour component. This allows you to do gamma correction, adjust the contrast and brightness, plus more. o Ink compensation for the correction of ink impurities. o Workbench 2/3 graphical user interface (GUI). o The driver can print up to 256 shades of grey from normal Amiga applications. Standard Amiga drivers are limited to 16. o Full control over page size, paper margins and size of the printed graphics. o Full control over built-in printer typefaces. o The software is very fast and automatically uses improved routines if the software is run on an Amiga with a 68020/30/40 CPU. o Builtin support for the arXon electronic centronic switch box. o Free definable tab stops. o Job end signal. o Supports Workbench 1.3, 2.0, 2.1 and 3.0. These are not the complete capabilities of the Star drivers, merely some highlights. System Requirements =================== The software is compatible with the entire family of Amiga computers. These include the A500, A1000, A1200, A1500, A2000, A2500, A2500/30, A3000 and A4000. The software was designed to run under Workbench versions 2, 2.1 and 3. The printer driver also work under Workbench 1.3, but must be controlled via the keyboard (CLI) because Star programs with that have a GUI require at least Workbench 2. Installing ========== The driver is a replacement for the Commodore supplied printer drivers. It is a 100 percent Amiga compatible printer driver, except that it offers many more functions than a normal printer driver. The additional functions of the driver are controlled by a preferences program included with Star driver disk. The programs and driver are described in detail later. Start the installation by a simple double click on the Install icon, found in the main drawer of the driver disk. You should follow the checklist below for installing the Star software: o Set up and connect your printer as described in the printer's user manual and Amiga system manual. o Ensure your printer's initial setup is configured to Epson emulation and USA character set. On the SJ144 this is the default factory setting. For other dot matrix printers, set the printer dip-switches as descibed below: Automatic line feed off Automatic carriage return off Emulation Epson (standard) International charset USA (national characters are handled by the driver automaticly! o Boot your Amiga with your usual system or Workbench disk. o Double click on the Install icon found in the drawer of the disk. The install program will copy the driver to your system disk. In order to do so, you need 45 KByte empty disk space on your system disk. ! Most likely floppy users must make space on their system disk in order to install the driver. This can be done by deleting unneeded programs using the Workbenchs 3.0 "Delete..." menu item. Here is list of programs that might be deleted: Sys:Utilities/Clock (13 KByte) Sys:devs/printers/generic (1.5 KByte) Sys:system/nofastmem (1 KByte) Sys:c/Edit (15 KByte) Sys:c/Diskchange (0.5 KByte) Sys:c/Lock (0.5 KByte) Sys:c/Search (1.5 KByte) Sys:c/MagTape (1.5 KByte) In case you run out of disk space, you may install the Star preferences program on any free disk, saving you disk space on the system disk. o If not allready done by the installation program, start Preferences on your system disk (if you own Kickstart 2.0 use the "printer" preference program) and select the driver reported by the installation program. Adjust all other preference parameters to your environment. See your system manual for more information about the preference program. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !Make sure "Ordered" dither and density > 2 is set in Preferences! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! After successfully running the Install program, try printing from the application with which you normally print. The Workbench Printer Drivers ============================= After installing a Star driver you should be able to print from your normal application programs. In most cases you must further adjust the driver settings to your printer to get the best printer output possible. Correct adjustments often lead to major quality improvements. This chapter describes most of the functions for controlling the Star driver. But before describing the driver in its own special section, some general things about printer drivers, and especially the Star driver. Printer drivers offer a way of sending configuration-independent output to a printer attached to the Amiga. A driver can be thought of as a filter that takes standard commands as input, and translates them into commands understood by specific printers. The commands sent to the printer via the prt: device are standardized on all Amigas so that programmers only have to write the software once and not for all possible printer emulations. It is the task of the printer driver to translate an Amiga printer command into the correct command for a particular printer. For each type of printer in use, a printer driver (or a driver for a compatible printer) should be present in the "devs:printers" directory. If you want to print text in bold, you have to decide whether to use a standard Amiga command (also known as an escape sequence) via prt:, or the command mentioned in your printer manual via par:. Often people get confused about prt: and par:. Do not send commands mentioned in your printer manual to prt:. This will most likely fail, or cause wrong characters in your printer output. You should always prefer prt: to par: because commands send to prt: can be used on every printer, not just the kind of printer you have. The par: device has even more shortcomings than prt:, but we're not concerned with them in this manual. An often used argument from programmers using par: is the unlimited control over the printer. This is a fallacy. You can control every printer feature via the prt: device. The Star Printer Driver ----------------------- The Star printer driver automatically check for the processor being used (68000, 68010/68020, 68030, 68040) and optimize the print routines accordingly, so there is no need for a special `turbo' version of the driver in order to get the most out of your Amiga. The tables below show the graphics densities supported by the Star driver. Density is set in Workbench preferences. Often you can also choose a density from within your application program. Beside the density tables, a table with all driver-supported Amiga escape sequences (use prt: not par: for these commands) is shown. StarSJ144 densities. Density X dpi Y dpi Comment 1 180 360 no adjustments/dither 2 360 360 no adjustments/dither 3 180 360 4 180 360 5 180 360 6 360 360 7 360 360 Star24Plus with Epson 24 emulation Density X dpi Y dpi Comment 1 360 180 no adjustments/dither *1 2 360 360 no adjustments/dither, *1, two pass 3 180 180 4 120 360 zweimal überfahren 5 180 360 zweimal überfahren 6 360 180 *1 7 360 360 zweimal überfahren, *1 Star24Plus with Epson 48 or Star 48 emulation Density X dpi Y dpi Comment 1 360 180 no adjustments/dither, *1 2 360 360 no adjustments/dither, *1 3 180 180 4 120 360 zweimal überfahren 5 180 360 6 360 180 *1 7 360 360 *1 *1 - in this mode the printer cannot print two consecutive dots in a row. It is recommended that you only use this density for B&W Shade dumps. Star9Plus Treiber Density X dpi Y dpi Comment 1 144 144 plotter graphics, no adjustments/dither 2 240 216 quadruple density, no adjustments/dither 3 120 72 double density 4 144 144 plotter graphics 5 240 144 quadruple density 6 144 216 double density 7 240 216 quadruple density Name Sequence Function aRIS ESCc reset aRIN ESC 1 init. aIND ESCD lf aNEL ESCE return,lf aRI ESCM reverse lf aSGR0 ESC[0m norm.chars aSGR3 ESC[3m italics on aSGR23 ESC[23m italics off aSGR4 ESC[4m underline on aSGR24 ESC[24m underline off aSGR1 ESC[1m boldface on aSGR22 ESC[22m boldface off aSFC SGR30-39 foregrd col. aSHORP0 ESC[0w normal pitch aSHORP2 ESC[2w elite on aSHORP1 ESC[1w elite off aSHORP4 ESC[4w condensed on aSHORP3 ESC[3w condensed off aSHORP6 ESC[6w enlarged on aSHORP5 ESC[5w enlarged off aDEN6 ESC[6"z shadow on aDEN5 ESC[5"z shadow off aDEN4 ESC[4"z double on aDEN3 ESC[3"z double off aDEN2 ESC[2"z NLQ on aDEN1 ESC[1"z NLQ off aSUS2 ESC[2v super on aSUS1 ESC[1v super off aSUS4 ESC[4v sub on aSUS3 ESC[3v sub off aSUS0 ESC[0v normal line aPLU ESCL part. up aPLD ESCK part. down aFNT0 ESC(B typeface 0 aFNT1 ESC(R typeface 1 aFNT2 ESC(K typeface 2 aFNT3 ESC(A typeface 3 aFNT4 ESC(E typeface 4 aFNT5 ESC(H typeface 5 aFNT6 ESC(Y typeface 6 aFNT7 ESC(Z typeface 7 aFNT8 ESC(J typeface 8 aFNT9 ESC(6 typeface 9 aFNT10 ESC(C typeface 10 aPROP2 ESC[2p prop. on aPROP1 ESC[1p prop. off aJFY5 ESC[5 F auto left aJFY7 ESC[7 F auto right aJFY6 ESC[6 F auto full aJFY0 ESC[0 F justify off aJFY1 ESC[1 F word fill aVERP0 ESC[0z 1/8" spacing aVERP1 ESC[1z 1/6" spacing aSLPP ESC[nt form length n aPERF ESC[nq perf skip n aPERF0 ESC[0q perf skip off aCAM ESC 3 Clear margins aTBC3 ESC[3g Clear h tabs aTBC4 ESC[4g Clear v tabs aTBCALL ESC 4 Clr h tabs aTBSALL ESC 5 default tabs aRAW ESC[Pn"r 'Pn' raw The StarPref Preferences Programs ================================= Beside all the functions mentioned in the section above, there are more options unique to the Star driver. These options are managed using Commodore's standard environment variables and can be controlled by using the Shell "setenv" and "getenv" commands. But setting environment variables this way can be a very complex task, so a StarPref preferences program is available to make the job easy. The StarPref preferences programs provide an intuitive GUI and requires at least Workbench 2 to run. If you are not using at least Workbench 2 (V37 and above), you must use the Shell commands for controlling the driver variables (described in detail in an extra chapter on page envs ). The StarPref preferences programs can be controlled by the mouse and/or the keyboard. Each gadget of the program corresponds to the underlined letter in a gadget. Pressing that letter is equivalent to clicking on the gadget. In the case of a cycle gadget, you can use the upper case or lower case letter to cycle back and forth. See your system manual on how to control the file requester by keyboard or mouse. All windows are opened directly under your mouse pointer, so you don't have to move or scroll the screen to control the program. All windows are opened on the default public screen. You may specify a special public screen by setting the Tool Type PUBSCREEN screenname (the name is case sensitive) and the StarPref preferences program will open its windows on your application program's screen. You can specify a screen if you run the preferences program from a Shell with the StarPref PUBSCREEN screenname For example, if you use the ASDG CEDPro text editor you may specify "StarPref PUBSCREEN CygnusEdScreen1" and the StarPref preferences program will open its windows on the CEDPro screen. Make sure the CEDPro screen is public before running the example. You need at least CEDPro version 2.12 for this example. StarPref is independent, which means they use any system font you have chosen in preferences for displaying the text in gadgets and windows. You can force the preferences program to always use the topaz 8 font by defining a TOPAZ Tool Type. This is equal to using a TOPAZ Shell argument. After starting the preferences program, the main window opens. This contains several gadgets which the equivalents of the appropriate environment variables. The names and settings of these environment variables are covered in an extra chapter. This chapter covers all you need to know about controlling the driver via the StarPref preferences programs. Each gadget of the StarPref program will now be described in detail: Separation You may print separations with the help of the separation gadgets in the upper right half of the window. Each primary colour that is checkmarked will be printed (C=cyan, M=magenta, Y=yellow, K=black). An example of the use of the separation function can be found in the Tips and Tricks chapter. Fast Graphics If set to on (with a checkmark), the driver sends out graphics faster to the printer. While the printing speed can be improved significantly, printing quality may be loosed and vertical lines may be printed misaligned. Some old Star printers do not work with Fast Graphics turned on. To check you printer simply print a grid (horizontal and vertical lines with 3 cm distances) of thin black lines on white paper in density 7. With or without "Fast Graphics", all lines should be printed the same and without any bad alignment. The printerhead should print vertical lines in one go and should not stop for each vertical line, as this would result in a loss of print speed instead of increasing the speed. Mirror If set to on (with a checkmark), graphics will be mirrored; especially useful if you want to print pictures intended for T-shirt art. You can buy special ink/ribbons from various dealers for Star printers. Textcolor With the Textcolor cycle gadget you may choose the default text colour for the printer. Typeface The Typeface cycle gadget allows you to define the printer typeface. "Typeface 0" selects the typeface selected with the ESC-k-0 command of your printer (see your manual or simply try). "Typeface 1" select typeface ESC-k-1 and so on. Graphic Mode The StarSJ144 driver supports two graphic printing modes. In Epson48 mode, the drivers prints graphics using the printers Epson emulation. The printer can print up to 48 dots per line in Epson emulation, while the CDM mode supports up to 144 dots. You can't print text using the printers internal fonts in CDM mode. I strongly recommend the CDM mode for any graphic printings because of the higher speed and quality. If you do need both, text and graphic, you must use the slower Epson mode. Beside the Epson48 mode, the Star24Plus driver offers two more modes: Epson 24 - the default 24 pin printer emulation with up to 360*360 dpi. Star 48 - this mode is similar to the Epson 48 mode and can be used on Star SJ48 and SJ144 printers. Color Mode/Supergrey Normal Workbench printer drivers are limited to 16 shades of grey. After brightening the graphics output, even fewer shades are available. The Star driver does not have this limitation and can print colour pictures in up to 256 shades of grey. With Supergrey enabled, every colour picture will be printed as a greyscale picture if you select colour instead of greyscale as the graphics output mode. With Supergrey it is the printer driver's task to convert the colour data into greyscale data. While this can be done by the printer device instead of the printer driver (as normal Workbench drivers do), the Star printer driver colour-to-greyscale conversion routines are more precise. Because of this you can print a 4096 colour HAM picture in up to 256 shades of grey instead of the normal 16 shades. Supergrey will replace the normal colour dump of the driver. If you want to print more than 16 shades of grey (and that's what Supergrey is all about!) you must define a custom dither matrix in the StarPref program that enables you to print more than 16 shades. Defining a dither matrix using StarPref is described below. As default, a 64 shade Halftone A dither is used. Supergrey works with nearly every Amiga application simply by printing in Workbench's colour mode, even if your printer isn't a colour printer. Application programs that provide their own dither routines should not be used with Star custom dither routines, and because of this should not be used with Supergrey . Programs with custom dither routines include Art Department Professional's PrefPrinter saver, TruePrint24, PageStream. The Studio picture-printing program also belongs to this category of programs, but it automatically detects whether you are printing in Supergrey or colour. Supergrey can be disabled in several ways. Take care that none of the following special cases are in effect if you want to print pictures using Supergrey: o Star's custom dither and colour correction routines can be turned off by printing with a Workbench density below 3. Because of this, Supergrey works only with graphics densities above 2. o Star's custom dither and colour correction routines can be turned off by printing with a Workbench dither method other than "ordered". Because of this, Supergrey works only with the "ordered" dither routine set in Workbench preferences. This does not mean that you cannot print a halftone dither with Supergrey. You just have to use the Star dither routines set in StarPref instead of the dither routines set in Workbench preferences, because only the Star dither routines offer more than 16 shades of grey. o Supergrey can always be turned of using StarPref. The Table below shows all parameters that must be enabled for printing with Supergrey. Function Density Workbench dither Supergrey >2 ordered Colour Adjustment >2 ordered Ink compensation >2 ordered Driver dithers >2 ordered Note: the number of printable shades of greys in Supergrey depends on the number of shades supported by the dither method set in StarPref. Up to 256 shades are possible, and supported by the Star dither routines. Often a dither method that produces 64 shades (default) gives best results. Timeout Most people know the "Printer trouble..." requester well. This system requester most often appears when you print a document that is several pages long. The requester is caused by the computer not transferring waiting data to the printer for a period of time (usually 30 seconds). If there is a `timeout' the printer device assumes an error and the requester appears. A timeout may also appear without a real error happening if your printer is waiting for (or slowly feeding in) a new sheet of paper, for example. This operation often needs more than 30 seconds, and during this time no data is accepted by the printer. With Timeout you can specify a higher timeout value, resulting in fewer timeout requesters. A value from 1 to 999 seconds is allowed (default 60 seconds). Instead of defining a huge timeout value there is another solution available: use the CMD program (see your Workbench disk) to redirect the parallel/serial output to a file on disk. After this, use the Copy command or a printer spooler to copy the file to par: . This technique may also result in a better output quality, especially with inkjet printers. Note: If there is a real timeout error you will have to wait the number of seconds specified by Timeout until an error requester appears, thus allowing you to cancel the print job. So choose your Timeout value wisely. Job End If the printer device gets closed after a dump, you can tell the driver to signal the end of the print job. This is especially useful on huge graphic dumps which might require some time. There are two kinds of signals. You can cause a beep (Ctrl-G) on the printer, a DisplayBeep on the Amiga, or both. arXon Port The Star driver supports the arXon parallel switch-box, an external 1 to 3 Centronics switch controllable by software. You can ask the printer driver to automatically switch to the required port for printing, and switch back to the previously used port after printing. This enables you to use a scanner, a digitizer and a printer from your Amiga's parallel port without having to switch between the devices manually. If you specify Default as the port, no switching will take place. Information about the arXon switch-box may be obtained from: arXon GmbH Assenheimer Str. 17 D-60489 Frankfurt Germany Tel: 010-49-69-7896891 Fax: 010-49-69-7896878 The environment variable sbox_active must be specified before using the driver in order to enable the switch-box feature of the driver. This is because sbox active is used to determine whether a switch-box is installed or not. sbox_active is defined by the arXon software. Save You may leave the StarPref preferences program by clicking on the Save gadget. Changes made to the settings will be saved for permanent use. Use You may leave the StarPref preferences program by clicking on the Use gadget. Changes made to the settings will be saved temporarily and will stay active until you reboot the computer or change the settings using StarPref again. Cancel You may leave the StarPref preferences program by clicking on the Cancel gadget. Changes made to the settings will not be recognised or saved. More control windows -------------------- There are four gadgets in the bottom half of the main StarPref window. The ellipsis (three dots) in these gadgets means that another window will be opened when you select the gadget. Here is detailed description of each of the four windows. Customize Tabulators... Tabulators The gadgets in this window let you customize the horizontal tab stops settings of your printer, useful for printing program listings and tables. Up to 32 tab stops may be defined. All tab stops above the limit of 32 are ignored, and a requester will tell you so. Horizontal tabs are usually selected and stored by the printer in characters, not inches. Thus, any change in the character spacing can change the physical locations of horizontal tabs, but the logical positions remain unchanged. You can set or unset a tab stop by clicking in the gadget at the required position. A 'T' is used for a tab stop. The '-' and '+' characters are used to help you find the correct position. Using the slider below the gadget you can scroll the `tab stops' gadgets to the required position. Clear Tabs With Clear Tabs you can clear all tab stops. Set every n chars With the n: and Set every n chars gadgets you can easily set tab stops with the same distance. Simply enter the distance into the n: gadget and select Set every n chars . Note: the printer driver uses a default distance of eight characters. If you want to reset your customized tabs stops settings to the printer default values, simply call up Customize Tabs... and the window will open with a default n: value of 8. Press "Set every n chars" to select the default value. Use - Cancel You can leave the window with the Use or Cancel gadget. Changes made to the tab stops settings are accepted with Use. Cancel leaves the tab stops unchanged, and any changes made will be lost. Note: Use does not save the changes made to your environment. This is done by using the Use or Save gadget in the main window. Page Size and Margins... The gadgets in this window let you customize the paper size and margins. This window contains many additional settings that are unknown to most normal printer drivers. Enable Form If Enable Form is checkmarked, page length (as set in Workbench preferences), Top Margin and Perforation Skip will be enabled by the driver. In order to stay compatible with normal Workbench printer drivers, by default the settings are not used. Some applications require well-defined paper sizes and margins for printing forms. The Star driver provides you with these facilities by checkmarking Enable Form. It may require some experimentation (and paper) until you have found the correct values for a specific application. Top Margin Number of lines for the top border of the page. This setting is only supported by some, not all Star printers. Perforation Skip Perforation Skip specifies the number of lines that the printer skips over at the end of each page. This causes the printer to skip the perforation between pages of continuous forms. If zero lines is specified, perforation skip will be disabled. If the specified value is greater than or equal to the form length (as defined in the Workbench preferences program), the skip perforation is cancelled and the top and bottom margins become inactive. The Perforation Skip is only enabled if Enable Form is checkmarked. Page Length Paper Length is a read-only gadget showing the paper length as defined in Workbench preferences. You can use the value as a guide to setting your perforation skip and top margin values. Changes made to the paper length preferences are automatically detected by the StarPref program, and the gadget is updated immediately without the need for exiting StarPref. The Paper Length is only enabled if Enable Form is checkmarked. Custom ResX Custom ResY If the selected paper format in preferences (Workbench 2.0: "Printer") is CUSTOM, this option allows you to specify the width of the printable area of paper in inch wide dots. The size is used only for graphics dumps and does not affect text printouts. For example, if you are using Workbench 1.3 (which doesn't have a DIN A4 option) you can specify an X resolution of 2804 dots (19.78cm, 7.8in), which is equal to the DIN A4 size used by most Commodore printer drivers. If you specify zero (the default) as the X resolution, the US-LETTER resolution of 2880 dots (20.3cm, 8in) will be used. The allowed range is 0 to 65535 dots. Similar to Custom ResX, Custom ResY defines the height of the printable paper size. Use - Cancel You can leave the window with the Use or Cancel gadget. Changes made to the settings are accepted with Use. Cancel leaves the settings unchanged and any changes made will be lost. Note: Use does not save the changes made to your environment. This is done by using the Use or Save gadget in the main window. The Color Adjustments... window. The gadgets in this window ebable you to make colour adjustments and compensate for ink impurities. But why are colour adjustments and ink compensation needed? o Most colour printer users must have come across the problem of graphics dumps being too dark, or the output containing too much red. Using the colour adjustment you can easily correct this. As default, the Star driver uses a gamma function to bright up printings. o The output quality of printers depends ultimately on the ribbon and type of paper being used. Using the colour adjustment you can easily alter the driver to various ribbon and paper types. o The colour adjustment allows you to do image processing by controlling the contrast, gamma correction and brightness of each primary print colour. You can even filter out unwanted colours. o Printer inks (or inks used in ribbons) are not completely pure materials. For example there is some yellow mixed into the magenta ink, and there is some magenta in the cyan ink. The ink compensation values will correct for these impurities allowing blues, for example, to be printed as blues rather than purples. Colour adjustment is only one of several processes needed for printing graphics. You can control the graphics output of the Star drivers for each of these processes. Before the printer driver can process a picture for printing it must get separated into its primary printing colours. Each primary printing colour can be adjusted by the Star printer driver using 16 sliders which describe a conversion function. Colour adjustment is needed because the colour values displayed on computer monitor and the colours printed by printers are different. A bright red on the monitor, for example, usually gets printed as dark red; blue is often printed as violet; and the printer output is often too dark. Most printers cannot print two adjacent dots without overlapping them slightly. This problem is known as `dot gain' Dot gain , causing muddy and dark output. You can avoid dot gain problems by printing with a lower resolution (for instance 180 dpi on a 360 dpi printer) or by using a special dither matrix and colour adjustment which is not affected by dot gain problems. You can control the colour adjustment sliders in several ways. There are three sliders in the upper right half of the Color Adjustments... window. These provide global control over all 16 sliders that describe the conversion function. Brightness The brightness adjustment globally modifies the general brightness of a colour component. It does this by uniformly shifting the colour map upwards or downwards. All input intensities of one primary printing colour will be shifted upwards (made brighter) by the colour map. If you brighten all the primary printing colours, the whole picture gets brighter. The brightness adjustment is not without its drawbacks. Notice that the darkest input value is brightened, leaving no darker colours for printing. This means that the darkest intensity in the image will also be brightened, which may not be acceptable. Also note that most of the brighter levels now have exactly the same intensity levels, meaning that all details which had intensity levels in that range are lost. The brightness control in StarPref ranges from to 50, with zero being the neutral value. Setting the brightness control to a positive value uniformly shifts the colour map upwards, towards a brighter colour component. Similarly, a negative value causes the colour to be shifted towards darkness. Contrast The contrast adjustment globally modifies the general contrast of a colour component. Contrast adjustments can be visualized by thinking of the neutral colour map being pivoted around its centre point. At one extreme the colour map becomes flat, which means that all input intensities map to the same output intensity (no contrast). The other extreme is a vertical line for a colour map, which produces a primary colour with exactly two intensities (maximum contrast). Notice again that contrast loses some amount of visual detail, just as the brightness adjustment does. This may or may not be acceptable for any given image. The contrast control in StarPref ranges from to 50, with zero being the neutral value. Setting the contrast control to a positive value uniformly pivots the colour map around its centre in an anti-clockwise direction (towards the vertical), which increases visible contrast. Gamma The gamma adjustment provides a way to significantly brighten a colour component without losing that much detail. It does this by introducing a curve into the colour map, whereby the colour map is shifted upwards or downwards (made brighter or darker respectively) but no portion of the colour map gets clipped to the maximum or minimum values. The gamma adjustment also affects the contrast of the colour component. In the darker part of the spectrum contrast is increased; in the lighter part of the spectrum contrast is decreased. The gamma control in StarPref ranges from -50 to +50, where zero represents no gamma adjustment. The overall effect of gamma adjustment is usually quite satisfactory and we recommend its liberal use. There are several reasons for this. The gamma function provides an easy way to brighten a picture without losing detail. Also, monitor tubes show a computer picture using a non-linear conversion function, and this function is very similar to the gamma function. Using the gamma function allows you to more easily adapt the printer output to the monitor picture. Set "Set" globally sets all 16 adjustment sliders of the active colour component to the values defined by the Gamma, Brightness and Contrast sliders. Invert Bright+/- Default Beside "Set" there are more gadgets providing global control over the 16 adjustment sliders. Invert inverts all 16 sliders. The two "Bright" gadgets allow you to increase or decrease the brightness of all 16 sliders. "Default" resets all 16 sliders to the default values wich is equal to a gamma correction of +32. Adjustment sliders The 16 colour adjustment sliders in the middle of the window give you precise control over the colour adjustment function of the driver. Each slider can be set to one of 256 shades. A higher level means less of the currently selected primary colour. A lower level means more colour, causing a darker picture. All 16 sliders describe a conversion function Conversion function . Dark input values are adjusted by the sliders to the left, bright colours are adjusted by the sliders to the right. As soon as you click on one of the sliders, the value represented by the slider is shown in the Level gadget on the left-hand side of the window. Colour pictures are printed by most printers using three or four primary colours. Usually these colours are cyan, magenta, yellow and black. (Black is not used by DeskDriver). All 16 colour adjustment sliders are applied to one primary colour. You can choose which primary colour to adjust using the Color cycle gadget in the upper left-hand corner of the window. But what if you want to use the gamma function to brighten a greyscale picture? For this purpose select B/W-Grey as the colour and use the gamma slider to select the required gamma setting. Apply the gamma setting to the 16 adjustment sliders by clicking on the "Set" gadget. After leaving the StarPref program using "Use" or "Save", the gamma function is active. While each of the 16 colour sliders provides 256 levels, this does not necessarily mean you can print 256 shades of each colour. The number of colours or shades printed depends upon the number of colours or shades supported by the dither matrix being used. The Star installation program installs an Ordered-A dither method with 64 shades as the default dither routine. More information about setting up a dither matrix can be found on in a chapter below. Push Pop Now, say you want to apply a specific gamma function to each primary colour. Sure, you could use the same technique for installing the gamma function as described in the example above for every primary colour. But this technique can be a real pain if you have adjusted some sliders by hand. This is why the Push and Pop gadgets got introduced. Push saves all your current slider settings on to the stack. After changing the colour component you can easily Pop the settings from the stack. Using Pop for every colour component is fast and easy. Load Save You can save the your colour adjustment function to a file for later use. You could save your adjustment settings for various kind of paper types, for example, and reload them when needed. Save will cause the system file requester to appear and you can choose a path and filename for saving. Load will cause the file requester to appear and you can choose the file for loading. Note that Save and Load only affect the currently selected colour component. Comp M Comp Y The integer gadgets Comp. M and Comp. Y can be used to adjust the ink compensation of the printer driver. Printer inks used in ribbons are not completely pure materials. For example there is some yellow mixed into the magenta ink, and there is some magenta found in the cyan ink. The ink compensation values will correct for these impurities allowing blues, for example, to be printed as blues rather than purples. Comp. M defines the percentage of magenta ink in the cyan ink. Comp. Y defines the percentage of yellow ink in the magenta ink. Star's custom dither and colour correction routines can be turned off by printing with a Workbench dither method other than "ordered", or a density below 3. Because of this, colour adjustment and ink compensation work only with the ordered dither routine set in Workbench preferences and densities above 2. Colour adjustment works with nearly every Amiga application. Application programs with their own colour adjustment routines should not be used with Star's routines enabled. Programs with their own colour adjustment routines include Art Department Professional's PrefPrinter saver, TruePrint24 and PageStream. Use density 1 or 2 when printing with these programs. The Studio picture-printing program also belongs to this category of programs, but it automatically disables the Star driver's colour adjustment routines. Use Cancel You can leave the window with the Use or Cancel gadget. Changes made to the settings are accepted with "Use". Cancel leaves the settings unchanged and any changes made will be lost. Note: Use does not save the changes made to your environment. This is achieved by using the Use or Save gadget in the main window. Customize Dither... Dither Routines Most printers print pictures using a `binary coding', or to put it more simply: a dot can either be printed, or not. There is no way to control the brightness of a single dot. A monochrome printer can only print one colour: black. Colour printers support the printing of three or four primary colours: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. A special technique is needed for printing more shades. Dither routines provide such a technique. Dither routines print dots of a primary colour in various patterns, creating the impression of different shades, thanks to the fact that the human eye can't distinguish adjacent dots from a distance. Each pixel of a picture produces a pattern of printed dots. The pattern is described by a dither matrix. There are almost no limits to the size of the dither matrix. Workbench dither matrices (ordered and halftone) are of the size , which is equal to printing shades A normal matrix produces 17 shades. This is not true in case of the Workbench dither matrix. . A matrix consists of threshold values. Each matrix value is compared with the picture's pixel value. If the value of the pixel is higher than the matrix value, a dot gets printed. Dither patterns allow you to print a huge number of shades. The number of printable shades mainly depends on the size of the dither matrix used and the quality of the printer. Many printers have problems with overlapping dots. These problems have a huge influence on the decision as to which dither matrix to use. There is also a strong relationship between a dither matrix and the colour adjustment required. A change of print density often requires a change of the dither matrix and/or colour adjustment, and changing the dither matrix usually requires the colour adjustment also to be changed. StarPref gives you the facilities to define the dither matrix used for printing. Many dither matrices are included with the Star driver. These are handled in an extra below chapter; this chapter covers only the use of the Customize Dither... window. This window allows you to edit the current dither pattern. Instead of editing a pattern, you may quickly load a pattern using the window shown after selecting "Customize Dither...". The theoretical aspects of digital halftoning are complex, and are way beyond the scope of this manual. If you are interested in more detailed information, a very good book can be recommended: Robert Ulichney Digital Halftoning MIT Press ISBN 0-262-21009-6 The book is easy to understand and comes with lots of examples. Most of the dither routines used by the Star software are described in detail in this book. Load Save Using the Customize Dither... window is very similar to using the Color Adjustments... window. The Load and Save gadgets allow you to load and save the required dither matrix for a particular colour component. Only the currently selected Color component is saved or loaded. Push Pop Let's assume you want to print a colour picture using the halftone dither. There are two ways you can enable the halftone dither in StarPref. You can either load the dither matrix from disk for each primary colour, or you can use the stack. The stack can be controlled using the Push and Pop gadgets on the left-hand side of the window. All you have to do to install the required dither matrix is to load the dither. Afterwards click on the Push gadget and the dither is saved on to the stack. Now switch the primary colour and Pop the matrix from the stack. Enable the matrix for all primary colours by using the stack. You can switch between the primary colours by using the Color cycle gadget Color . A Star dither matrix may be any rectangular shape and can consist of up to 512 values. Up to 64 values can be included on each row (X) or column (Y). You can use the X and Y sliders to define the size of the matrix. The current size of the matrix is shown on the left-hand side of the window. Star's custom dither routines can be turned off by printing with a Workbench dither method other than ordered , or a density below 3. The custom dither routines works with nearly every Amiga application. Application programs that provide their own dither routines should not be used with Star's routines enabled. Programs that do not work include Art Department Professional's PrefPrinter saver, TruePrint24 and PageStream. Use density 1 or 2 when printing with these programs. The Studio picture-printing program also belongs to this category of programs, but it automatically disables the Star driver's dither routines. Dither Routines Many dithering methods are supplied with this driver, and these are described below. In each case a larger dither mask size produces a printout which can represent a wider range of colours, but will produce less spatial information per unit area of paper. Conversely, a smaller dither mask size can reproduce fewer colours (or shades) but more closely approximates the true resolution of your printer. Another way of expressing this is simply that there is a tradeoff between printing ``lots'' of colours and printing in high resolution. Given a specific printer with a specific DPI capability, asking for ``lots'' of colours means using a larger dither mask size. A larger dither mask size cuts down on your effective resolution. For instance, using a dither mask of 16*16 on your 360 dpi printer will result in 360 / 16 = 22,5 dpi This values is often described as l/inch (lines per inch) or `screen frequency'. with full colour information. Note that this can work to your advantage when enlarging a picture. Enlarging means that there are more dots to work with, which offsets the loss in resolution caused by a larger dither mask size. This, added to the benefits to be had by being able to reproduce more colours (or shades). Also note that many printers, including most laser printers and dot-matrix printers, have considerable dot gain problems. For example, a 360 dpi printer does not actually print dots which are of an inch in size. Rather, its dots will be much larger. This causes some dithers, such as the Ordered dithers, to produce intensely over-saturated or `muddy' prints. Other dithers, such as the two halftone dithers, overcome this problem with low-end printers. If you want to learn more about dither routines and digital halftoning, here is a very good book to go for: Robert Ulichney Digital Halftoning MIT Press ISBN 0-262-21009-6 The book is easy to understand and comes with lots of examples. Most of the dither routines used by the Star driver are described in detail in this book. See the description of the "Customize Dither..." window for information on how to enable a required dither routine for a Star printer driver. OK, now let's discuss the dither routines in detail: While using the StarPref program, click on the button marked "Customize Dither..." for using one of the dithers described below. Several popular ordered dither methods are provided with StarPref. These can be loaded and enabled with the listview shown after clicking on Customize Dither... . The number of printable colours is usually directly related to the size of the dither matrix. Most of the ordered dither routines described below exist in several sizes. You can distinguish between them by their filenames. For instance a filename of "Halftone-A-4" means the Halftone A dither routine for 4 shades; while "Halftone-A-256" means the Halftone A dither routine for 256 shades. Halftone-A - number of colors Halftone-B - number of colors 10 Percent 20 Percent 50 Percent 80 Percent 90 Percent **** ******** ******** * *** **** ***** ** ***** ** *** **** ***** * ***** **** ******** ******** **** ******** ******** ** *** **** **** * ****** * ** *** **** **** * ***** * * **** ******** ******** The halftone dithers (Halftone-A and Halftone-B) differ in how they place a halftone matrix. This is the classic clustered halftone method used by most book publishers, and PostScript. To improve the dither output the halftone matrix is rotated by 45 degrees. Halftone-A causes the halftone matrix for each of the primary colours to be centred about the same point. This means that the primary colours will overlap completely, leaving a lot of white paper showing through. This may be appropriate for some better dye-sublimation type printers, or other colour printers with good registration where the inks mix well. Halftone-B, on the other hand, staggers the halftone matrix of each primary colour so that they do not overlap. This is similar in concept to traditional colour offset printing. Halftone-B may produce better results on printers whose inks do not mix well, and on printers with less than perfect registration. The halftone dithers can produce some extremely good results and compensate for the dot gain problems outlined above. Try both halftone dithers to see which one is better for your particular intention. If you are going to photocopy your printouts, using Halftone results in a much better copy. Halftone-B is somewhat different to the other dither matrices. You have a special dither matrix for each colour. Because of this, each dither filename includes the abbreviation of the color (C = cyan, Y = yellow, M = magenta, K = black or greyscale). If you are using Halftone-B with one of the Star printer drivers, you must increase the brightness of the black colour component by 50%. Use the bright+ gadget in the StarPref preferences programs for increasing brightness. Halftone-B is a good example of the relationship between colour adjustment and dither routines. You have to consider both settings. PrtDevice-Halftone-16 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% * * * * * * * * * * * ** * **** * * ** ** ** *** **** **** **** * ** ** ** ** ** ** **** * * * * * * * ** **** **** **** PrtDevice-Ordered-16 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% * * * * * * * * * *** **** **** **** * * * * * * * * * ** * **** * * * * * * * * * * ** **** **** **** * * * * * * * * * **** This dither matrix is the one used by the Workbench printer devices Halftone or Ordered dither. The dispersed ordered dither produces a regular repeating pattern which is often used for printing computer graphics. The ordered dither is particularly vulnerable to over-saturation due to dot gain in high resolutions. But you will get good output if you don't use the maximum print density of your printer (for instance, by using 180 dpi on a 360 dpi printer). Ordered-A-Dither 10 Percent 20 Percent 50 Percent 80 Percent 90 Percent * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ****** * * * * ******** ******** * * * * * * * * * * *** *** *** *** * * * * ******** ******** * * * * * * * * * * * * ***** ** * * * * ******** ******** * * * * * * * * * *** *** *** *** * * * * ******** ******** The dispersed ordered dither produces a regular repeating pattern which is often used for printing computer graphics. The ordered dither is particularly vulnerable to over-saturation due to dot gain in high resolutions. But you will get good output if you don't use the maximum print density of your printer (for instance, by using 180 dpi on a 360 dpi printer). Ordered-B-Dither 10 Percent 20 Percent 50 Percent 80 Percent 90 Percent * ** ** ** ** ******** ******** ** ** ** ** ** ******** ******** ** ** ** ** ***** ** ** ** ** ** **** *** ** * ** ** ** ******** ******** ** ** ** ** ******** ******** ** ** ****** ****** ** ** ****** ****** This dither is a mixture of a dispersed dither like Ordered and a clustered dither like Halftone. The dither is meant specially for high resolution printers with dot gain problems. For instance, if you print a picture with 360*360 dpi using Ordered-B-64, you get a picture that appears to be printed at 180*180 dpi. But while colours are printed emulating 180*180 dpi, all the black parts of the picture are printed using 360*360 dpi. Don't get confused, the printed picture is still better than a picture in real 180*180 dpi resolution. The Ordered-B dither is especially useful for colour DTP because you can combine good colour pictures with fine high quality text. Spiral-Dot-Screen - number of colors 10 Percent 20 Percent 50 Percent 80 Percent 90 Percent ******** ******** ****** ******** ******** * **** ****** ******** ******** *** **** ****** ******* ******** *** **** ****** ******* ******** * ****** ******* ******** ** ******* ******** ** A wide range of special effects clustered-dither matrices are available in the graphic arts industry, and all are easily simulated digitally. Spiral-Dot is such a dither. The spiral-dot dither is essentially half of the classical `screen', with dark squares growing to fill the plane without the alternating light squares. Spiral-Dot looks quiet similar to the Halftone-A matrix, zero degree rotated. Horizontal - number of colors Vertical - number of colors 10 Percent 20 Percent 50 Percent 80 Percent 90 Percent ******* ********* ***** ********* ********* **** ********* ********* ********* ******* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* **** A wide range of special effects clustered-dither matrices are available in the graphic arts industry, and all are easily simulated digitally. The Line dithers are such dithers. The horizontal (as well as the vertical) dither overcomes many of the dot gain problems that the Ordered dithers have with low-end printers. These dithers (particularly the diagonal dithers) are especially good for large pictures. Fwd-Brick- number of colors Bck-Brick- number of colors 10 Percent 20 Percent 50 Percent 80 Percent 90 Percent ** *** ***** ******* ******** * ** **** ****** * ****** * * *** * **** ** ***** ** ** ** *** *** **** *** * ** ** **** *** **** * *** * ***** ** ***** * ** **** ****** * ****** ** *** ***** ******* ******* A wide range of special effects clustered dither matrices are available in the graphic arts industry and all are easily simulated digitally. The Brick dithers are such dithers. The Forward-Brick (as well as the Backward-Brick) dither overcomes many of the dot gain problems that the error diffusion, Blue Noise and Ordered dithers have with inexpensive printers. These dithers are especially good for enlarged pictures. Floyd Steinberg (no "char" picture) This is a very popular error diffusion dither method first suggested by Floyd and Steinberg. They argued that a filter with four elements was the smallest number that could produce `good' results. The values were chosen to particularly ensure a checkerboard pattern at the middle grey or shade of colour. This dither method provides a good compromise of speed and quality. The reason for the popularity of this algorithm is clear -- several colour shade levels are represented by pleasingly isotropic, structureless distributions of dots. But there are some shortcomings: * Correlated artifacts in many of the colour shade level patterns. This can be easily seen by printing a greyscale ramp. * Directional hysteresis due to the raster order of processing. This artifact is most apparent in very light and very dark patterns. * Transient behaviour near edges or boundaries. Jarvis, Judice und Ninke In 1976 Jarvis, Judice and Ninke documented an error filter with 12 elements. The large filter size reduces some of the artifacts seen with the 4-element filter of Floyd and Steinberg, but directional hysteresis in the very dark and light regions are increased, and pixels are clustered together more in the middle of colour shade regions. It also sharpens the pictures. Stucki-Dither The Stucki filter provides nearly the same output as the Jarvis filter, though you may notice differences in sharpness. Blue-Noise 30-50% In trying several combinations of deterministic values in a 4-element error filter, none proved better than the famed filter of Floyd and Steinberg. Two variations of this basic filter are the Blue Noise dithers. Both are processed with serpentine rasters. The serpentine raster used in processing is responsible for much of the directional artifact elimination. The noisy threshold (30% or 50% white noise) breaks up most of the remaining stable texture patterns, yielding good radial symmetry at the expense of adding some low frequency energy. Blue noise is especially useful when printing light shades and fading colours. All error diffusion dithers, including Blue Noise, can produce very good results on colour printers that have little dot gain and very good registration. If it produces a washed-out print or particularly bad patterns, then try another dither (see the custom Ordered-B or Halftone, for instance). Errors & Fixes ============== For those who deal with computers and printers, it's a known fact: Everything possible that can go wrong, will go wrong. Especially when it comes to printing, there are many places were you can make mistakes. If you find a problem with a printer driver, please send a description which makes it possible to reproduce the problem. For this purpose, you should provide following information: o Which application program are you using, and which version of it? o Which Workbench revision are you using? o Include a dump of the program, as a file (use the CMD program from the Workbench disk for this) and in printed form. o If possible, provide a copy your Workbench disk or application, already set up for printing. o provide a dump of the "Report" program enclosed on all Star driver disks. You can get a dump by typing following lines in the Shell: "Star-Drivers:report >ram:dumpfile" "copy ram:dumpfile par:" Installation program fails Often, an error reported by the installation program is caused by full system disks. Please make sure there is enough free disk space available. 65KBytes free space is really save for installing the driver - not the StarPref program (wich requires ~90 KBytes and can be installed on any free disk) Par: or Prt:? Data should be sent to the printer only via parallel.device (par:) or printer.device (prt:), and not both at the same time as this may confuse the printer. No dump? If the printer device immediately reports an error while trying to print a graphic, check that you have selected the Star printer driver in Workbench preferences. No way for Kickstart 2&3? Your printer doesn't work under Kickstart 2 or 3, while with Kickstart 1.3 it works fine? Check the "on-line" and "out of paper" lines in the printer cable. Make sure they are connected correctly. If your cable is wired right, check the two Amiga port chips named 8520. There have been major changes in Kickstart 2 regarding the use of the port chips. Ask your dealer for help if these tips are too technical for you! Empty pages? Empty pages is a known problem of Amiga printer drivers. After graphics dumps an empty page is printed. So far there is no 100% cure for this problem. Some application programs don't cause an empty page if you enable the Continuous paper type in preferences. Printer trouble... ? Printer trouble... requester? Have a look at the TimeOut setting of the StarPref program. Setting a longer Timeout can avoid such requesters. Anyway, clicking on the Resume button continues printing without loss of data. No Formfeed? If a page is not ejected, check your paper type preferences. Make sure Single is selected as the paper type. Deluxe Paint users may run into the problem of an endless graphic dump -- the Deluxe Paint print requester won't disappear, and the printer doesn't eject the page. This is a known bug in Deluxe Paint and can be easily cured by a mouse click in the Deluxe Paint print requester. Differences between KS 2 and KS 1.3? After switching from Workbench 1.3 to 2/3 your graphic dumps are of different size? This most likely will happen to users using the DIN A4 paper size. For instance, under Workbench 1.3 you used the Letter size, and after switching to Workbench 2/3 you used the DIN A4 size. Because the Star driver supports the new paper sizes (DIN A4, A5 ...), you get a different printout under Workbench 2.0/2.1. Simply switch back to the Letter size to get the same result as under Workbench 1.3. Patching drivers There are several programs that allow you to `patch' printer drivers in order to alter specific commands or parameters like the Timeout value. Do not use these programs! To dark pictures? If your graphic dumps are too dark or wrongly coloured, it is most likely caused by the disabled colour adjustment routines of the Star driver. Environment Vars If you have never heard of `environment variables', this chapter is not for you. But don't panic, you won't be missing anything unless you are still using Workbench 1.3. So this chapter is mainly of interest to experienced users. It covers controlling the driver from ARexx, Shell or batch files. You may set options for the Star driver by using the setenv and getenv Shell commands instead of the StarPref preferences program. Setenv saves your option in a file in the ENV: directory. See your system manual for a complete description of the setenv and getenv commands. The driver will read in the arguments upon opening the printer device. If you don't have enough memory, the driver refuses to open. Note: setting options does not always mean they take effect immediately. So if you make changes by using setenv , flush the driver out of memory (AVAIL FLUSH) or run InitPrinter in order to let the driver know about your changes. The StarPref preferences programs will do this for you automatically. Remember that environment variables (which are stored in the ENV: directory) are normally erased by re-booting. If you don't want to set the environment variables every time you boot, you can place them in ENVARC: (Workbench 2/3) or assign ENV: to a non volatile disk (Workbench 1.3). Make sure you use the Commodore setenv command to set environment variables. Environment variable names are not case sensitive. OK, now a description of every environment variable in detail: sbox_printer 0|1|2|3 (default: 0) The driver supports the arXon parallel switch-box, an external 1 to 3 Centronics switch controllable by software. You can ask the printer driver to automatically switch to the required port for printing, and switch back to the previously used port after printing. This enables you to use a scanner, a digitizer and a printer from your Amiga's parallel port without having to switch between the devices manually. If you specify Default as the port, no switching will take place. Information about the arXon switch-box may be obtained from: arXon GmbH Assenheimer Str. 17 D-60489 Frankfurt Germany Tel: 010-49-69-7896891 Fax: 010-49-69-7896878 The environment variable sbox active must be specified before using the driver in order to enable the switch-box feature of the driver. This is because sbox active is used to determine whether a switch-box is installed or not. sbox_active is defined by the arXon software. StarGAdj: <Num1-16> StarCAdj: <Num1-16> StarMAdj: <Num1-16> StarYAdj: <Num1-16> StarKAdj: <Num1-16> (default: 0 90 117 137 153 167 179 190 200 210 218 226 234 241 248 255) You may define a colour adjustment function using 16 values for each primary print colour (G=grey, C=cyan, M=magenta, Y=yellow and K=black). Each of the 16 values must be in the range 0 (black) to 255 (white). The brightness of the input values increases from left to right (0 to 255). StarBeep: 0|1|2|3 (default: 0) If the printer device gets closed after a dump, you can tell the driver to signal the end of the print job. This is especially useful with huge graphic dumps which might require some time. There are two kinds of signals. You can cause a beep (Ctrl-G) on the printer, a DisplayBeep on the Amiga, or both: 0 = No signal (default) 1 = Beep 2 = Flash 3 = Beep Flash StarColor <Num> (default: 0) StarColor defines the default text printing colour: 0 = Black (default) 1 = Magenta 2 = Cyan 3 = Blue 4 = Yellow 5 = Red 6 = Green StarGDit: <X> <Y> <a11, a12,... etc.> (default: Halftone A 64) StarCDit: <X> <Y> <a11, a12,... etc.> (default: Halftone A 64) StarMDit: <X> <Y> <a11, a12,... etc.> (default: Halftone A 64) StarYDit: <X> <Y> <a11, a12,... etc.> (default: Halftone A 64) StarKDit: <X> <Y> <a11, a12,... etc.> (default: Halftone A 64) These variables allow you to define the required dither matrix for each primary print colour (G=grey, C=cyan, M=magenta, Y=yellow and K=black). Several dither matrices are included with StarPref (Ordered, Halftone, Spiral, Line, etc.). These matrices are stored in a directory named ` dither-settings ' which can be found in your ` Dither-Settings ' drawer. You may copy these matrices directly to env: , or define a matrix of your own. SetEnv StarEmu 0|1|2 (normal: 0) Defines graphic emulation: Star SJ144 driver: 0 = Epson 48 (default) 1 = CDM Star24Plus driver: 0 = Epson 24 (default) 1 = Epson 48 2 = Star 48 SetEnv StarCDitAlg 0|1|2|3|4|5 (normal: 0) Defines color dither algorithem. 0 = Order Algorithem as defined in Star(C|M|Y|K)Dit 1 = Floyd Steinberg 2 = Jarvis 3 = Stucki 4 = Blue Noise 30% Random 5 = Blue Noise 50% Random SetEnv StarGDitAlg 0|1|2|3|4|5 (normal: 0) Defines greyscale dither algorithem: 0 = Order Algorithem as defined in StarGDit 1 = Floyd Steinberg 2 = Jarvis 3 = Stucki 4 = Blue Noise 30% Random 5 = Blue Noise 50% Random StarTop <Num> (default: 0) Number of lines for the top border. StarGFeed <Num> (default: 0) Most printers have problems with their internal mechanics causing unwanted horizontal stripes in the graphic output. Often the linefeed is a bit too much or too little, causing dark or white horizontal lines. This problem is called `banding'. StarGFeed allows you to adjust the driver to the mechanical inaccuracy of the printer. Set StarGFeed to 1 if you have white lines in the output, or 2 if you have dark lines: 0 = Normal linefeed 1 = Decrease linefeed 2 = Increase linefeed StarForm ON|OFF (default: OFF) If StarForm is ON , page length (as set in Workbench preferences) and Perforation Skip will be enabled by the driver. In order to stay compatible with normal Workbench printer drivers, by default the settings are not used. Some applications require a well-defined paper size and margins for printing forms. The Star driver provides you with these facilities by setting StarForm to ON . It may require some experimentation (and paper) until you find the correct values for a specific application. StarMagenta: <Num> (default: 0%) Printer ribbon inks are not completely pure materials. For example there is some yellow mixed into the magenta ink, and some magenta in the cyan ink. The ink compensation values will correct for these impurities. With magenta compensation you specify the percentage of magenta in the cyan ink. The ink compensation function can be completely disabled by specifying 0 . You will notice that without the ink compensation function a blue sky will print as purple. With the ink compensation function set to 10--30 , blue skies are usually blue again. StarMagenta defines the percentage of magenta in the cyan ink, and may range from 0 to 100%. StarMirror: ON|OFF (default: OFF) If set to ON , graphics will be mirrored. Especially useful if you want to print pictures intended for T-shirt art. StarPerf: <Num> (default: 0 lines) If StarForm is set to ON, StarPerf specifies the number of lines that the printer skips at the end of each page. This causes the printer to skip the perforation between pages of continuous forms. If zero lines are specified, perforation skip will be disabled. If the specified StarPerf value is greater than or equal to the form length (as defined in the Workbench preferences program), the skip perforation is cancelled and the top and bottom margins become inactive. StarResX: <Num> (default: 0 dots) If the preferences paper size is CUSTOM , this option allows you to specify the horizontal resolution (width) for graphic dumps. The size is specified in 360 dpi dots. If you specify zero (the default) as the resolution, the US LETTER resolution of 2880 dots will be used. The allowed range for <Num> is 0 to 65535 dots. The StarResX setting is used by the driver for graphics printing only. StarResY: <Num> (default: 0 dots) If the preferences paper size is CUSTOM, this option allows you to specify the vertical resolution (height) for graphic dumps. The size is defined as 360 dpi dots. If you specify zero (the default) as the resolution, the US LETTER resolution will be used. The allowed range for <Num> is 0 to 65535 dots. The StarResY setting is used by the driver for graphics printing only. StarSep: C M Y K (default: CMYK) With this option you can print a CYMK colour component of a picture. For example, if you want to print the cyan component of a picture set StarSep to C . The combination of following characters, in any order, is allowed: C = Cyan M = Magenta Y = Yellow K = Black StarSuper: ON|OFF (default: OFF) Normal Workbench printer drivers are limited to 16 shades of grey. After brightening the graphic output, even fewer shades are available. Star drivers do not have this limitation and can print colour pictures in up to 256 shades of grey. With StarSuper enabled, every colour picture will be printed as a greyscale picture if you select colour instead of greyscale as the graphics output mode. With Supergrey it is the printer driver's task to convert the colour data into greyscale data. While this can be done by the printer device instead of the printer driver (as normal Workbench drivers do), the Star printer driver colour-to-greyscale conversion routines are more precise. Because of this you can print a 4096 colour HAM picture in up to 256 shades of grey instead of the normal 16. Supergrey will replace the normal colour dump of the driver. The Table below shows all parameters that must be enabled for printing with Supergrey. Function Density Workbench dither Supergrey >2 ordered Colour Adjustment >2 ordered Ink compensation >2 ordered Driver dithers >2 ordered Note: the number of printable shades of greys in Supergrey depends on the number of shades supported by the dither method set in StarPref. Up to 256 shades are possible, and supported by the Star dither routines. Often a dither method that produces 64 shades (default) gives best results. StarTab: <Num> (default: 9, 17, 25,...) This environment variable allows you to customize the horizontal tab stops settings of your printer. This may be useful for printing program listings and tables. Up to 32 tab stops may be defined. StarTime: <Num> (default: 60 seconds) If huge amounts of data are being transferred to the printer, the actual printing of the image happens much faster than the transfer of the data. A requester may appear on the screen saying ` Printer trouble... '. This appears because the printer device thinks no data has been transferred due to a hardware or software failure. With StarTime you can specify the time that should pass before the printer device puts up the error requester. With Timeout you can specify a higher timeout value, resulting in fewer timeout requesters. A value from 1 to 999 seconds is allowed (default 60 seconds). Instead of defining a huge timeout value there is another solution available: use the CMD program (see your Workbench disk) to redirect the parallel/serial output to a file on disk. After this, use the Copy command or a printer spooler to copy the file to par: . Note: if a real error occurs, you will have to wait the number of seconds specified by StarTime until an error requester appears, thus allowing you to cancel the print job. So choose your StarTime value wisely. StarType: <Num> (default: 0) Specifies the typeface to be selected on aRIS, aRIN and aFNT0. If you select zero (the default), the typeface selected on the printer control panel will be used. StarType may range from 0 to 255. See your printer manual for the values used for selecting a required typeface on your printer, and add 1 to the value. StarYellow: <Num> (default: 0%) Printer ribbon inks are not completely pure materials. For example there is some yellow mixed into the magenta ink, and some magenta in the cyan ink. The ink compensation values will correct for these impurities. With magenta compensation you specify the percentage of magenta in the cyan ink. The ink compensation function can be completely disabled by specifying 0%. You will notice that without the ink compensation function a blue sky will print as purple. With the ink compensation function set to 10-30%, blue skies are usually blue again. StarYellow defines the percentage of yellow in the magenta ink and may range from 0 to 100%. Glossary ======== Default A value used in place of a user-selected value. A factory default is a value programmed into the device at the factory; this value is stored in read-only memory (ROM) and cannot be changed by a user or operator. A user default is a default that is selectable via the control panel. Dot A dot is the smallest thing a printer can print. The number of dots printed per inch is referred to as the printer's resolution (dpi). Download The process of transferring soft fonts, macros or raster data from a host computer to the printer's user memory is called downloading. DPI See Dot. ENV: ENVARC: The Amiga operating system and the Star drivers stores their environment settings in two special directories named ENV: and ENVARC:. Settings saved in ENV: are only for temporary usage and get lost when turning the computer off. Parallel I/O An input/output interface that transmits more than one bit of information simultaneously. Centronics is an industry-wide standard form of a parallel interface. Pitch Pitch describes the number of characters printed in a horizontal inch. Pitch only applies to fixed-spaced fonts since the number of characters per inch varies for proportionally-spaced fonts. See Spacing. Printable Area The printable area is the area of the physical page on which the printer is able to place a dot, wheras the physical page refers to the actual size of the paper installed in the printer. Raster Graphics Images composed of groups of dots are called raster images. Spacing Fonts have either fixed or proportional spacing. Fixed-spaced fonts are those for which the inter-character spacing is constant. Proportionally-spaced fonts are those for which the inter-character spacing varies with the natural shape of a character. Typeface Typeface is a generic name for graphics symbols having common design features. Each typeface has unique and distinguishing characteristics.