It’s a bridge between the printing and mailing functions of Mac OS. Any application that can print to paper can now print directly to PowerTalk (AOCE) mail — which can go to another PowerTalk user, a PowerShare server account, or any destination for which you have a PowerTalk gateway, including fax machines and Internet (SMTP) mail addresses.
Is Print to Mail a print driver?
No, Print to Mail is an extension to another package which is a virtual print driver: Print2Pict by Baudouin Raoult <mailto:baudouin.raoult@ecmwf.int>. Print2Pict has been around for several years now, and has proven itself to be well worth its US$10 shareware fee. For that price, you get the Print2Pict Chooser extension (which supports printing to the Clipboard and to PICT files) and a base set of “Print2Pict extensions” which let you print to formats such as PICS, GIF, and TIFF, and to “PostCards” — stand-alone applications from which anyone can read the pages of your document, even if they don’t have the application that created it. Another author wrote a Print to QuickTime extension. So now you can see where Print to Mail fits into the picture.
So this is shareware on top of shareware?
Yes, it is. Print to Mail needs Print2Pict, and both are US$10 shareware by different authors. If you find Print to Mail useful, you should make two payments.
Suppose I think this is too good to be true. How do you propose to bring me back down to earth?
We should be realistic about what this software can do. Real PowerTalk-savvy applications like ClarisWorks and BBEdit are still the best way to send mail via PowerTalk, because you can send the “real” document in its native format. The document can be edited as it travels back and forth, without losing any information. Now, imagine the same users sending to each other in AppleMail or Snapshot format rather than ClarisWorks or BBEdit — it’s not the same; what’s received is only a set of “page pictures” of what was sent. But sometimes that’s good enough, and in the case of a fax gateway, those are the only formats that work. (Just try sending something from Microsoft Excel 5 to a fax gateway without Print to Mail!) Because Print to Mail has only a sequence of page pictures to work with, it can only send in AppleMail, Snapshot, and PostCard formats. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from attaching the original document as an enclosure.
Gotchas?
Print2Pict isn’t perfect. Certain versions have some difficulty (especially on Power Macintoshes) with Microsoft PowerPoint, FrameBuilder, Stickies, and probably others — whether you’re using Print to Mail or any other Print2Pict extension. Before 3.6, there was a bug which prevents the icons and pictures from appearing in Print to Mail’s options dialog panel. These are Print2Pict issues which you are welcome to take up with M. Raoult.
Text-oriented gateways (such as Mail*Link SMTP) don’t handle pictures well. If you are sending to SMTP addresses, sending in AppleMail or Snapshot format using Print to Mail will produce blank messages, so you should either send in PostCard format or attach the original document as an enclosure — either of these will be treated as an enclosure by the gateway.
Printing to mail takes a fair amount of memory, which the application may not have to offer. I hope that you’ll get a nice error message rather than a crash if this happens, so that you can increase the application’s memory size and try again.
You can’t enclose anything in a letter when using Print to Mail from Finder (an obscure thing to do).
How do I install Print to Mail?
It’s not hard, though Print2Pict has many options which you may want to check over before you print anything. Put the Print2Pict extension and the P2P Extensions folder in your Extensions folder, then put Print to Mail in the P2P Extensions folder. You don’t have to restart after this. Use Chooser to select Print2Pict as the current printer. Now, go to any application that has a Page Setup… menu command, and select it. Click the Options button in the resulting dialog to review the various Print2Pict options, including those of the Print to Mail extension. Note that you have to show Print2Pict where its P2P Extensions folder is, and until you do, it may seem that you don’t have any extensions.
Where’s the rest of the documentation?
It’s on-line. You can read about all of Print2Pict’s installed extensions through its About… and Help buttons; Print to Mail has a detailed section which you should read carefully. Also, there are help balloons for Print to Mail’s options dialog panel and for its mailer dialog, to explain what all the buttons are for.
How do I report problems and suggestions about Print to Mail?
Please send your problems and suggestions to AWOLSP@aol.com. The address for paper mail and shareware payments is AWOL Software Productions, PO Box 24207, Hazeldean RPO, Kanata, Ontario, Canada K2M 2C3. I look forward to hearing from you!
Revision History
1.1 (October 8, 1996)
• Completed on-line documentation.
• Added support for PostCard as a “main enclosure” format.
• Added proper error alerts for most common error types.
• Added an alert to handle an attempt to add an enclosure while printing from Finder.
