Archive Magazine 1996/ARCHIVE_96.iso/discs/utilities/utility_07/prn153iss1/Disc1/ReadMe

Text File | 1996-04-11 | 14KB | 344 lines

RISC OS 3 Printer Manager !Printers (1.53) Issue 1
==================================================

Copyright ⌐ Acorn Risc Technologies, A division of Acorn Computer Group plc, 1996.

Printers 1.53 upgrade disc one contains the following:

 Å !!Read1st, text file
 Å !Printers, version 1.53, containing
   Å MakePSFont 1.08 (08-Aug-95)
   Å PDriver    3.25 (20-Feb-95)
   Å PDriverDP  4.39 (28-Sep-95)
   Å PDriverPS  4.39 (28-Sep-95)
   Å PDumperSpt 1.21 (11-Sep-95)
   Å RemPrnMsgs 1.03 (08-Aug-95)
   Å RemPrnSpt  1.03 (08-Aug-95)
   Å PDumperCX  1.18 (29-Feb-96)
   Å PDumperDM  1.17 (20-Sep-95)
   Å PDumperE2  1.17 (20-Sep-95)
   Å PDumperIW  1.17 (20-Sep-95)
   Å PDumperLJ  1.17 (20-Sep-95)
   Å ColourTrans 1.57
 Å !Scrap
 Å ReadMe


!Printer 1.53 upgrade disc 2 contains

 Å !PrintEdit, version 0.44
 Å Printers
 Å User Guide


Disclaimer
----------

The software is provided "as is"; Acorn Computers Limited ("Acorn") makes no
warranty, express or implied, of the merchantability of this software or its
fitness for any particular purpose. In no circumstance shall Acorn be liable
for any damage, loss of profits, or any indirect or consequential loss
arising out of the use of this software or inability to use this software,
even if Acorn has been advised of the possibility of such loss.

Distribution
------------

Any person or organisation wishing to make these discs available on any
public access on-line system or via public domain, careware or shareware
service should contact Customer Services at Acorn in writing at the address
at the bottom of this file for licensing details. The contents of the discs
remain copyright of Acorn Risc Technologies.


Enhanced RISC OS 3 printer manager
----------------------------------

The enhanced printer manager is designed to run on RISC OS 3.10 or later,
and requires at least 2Mbytes of RAM.

Installation
------------

Please refer to the directory 'UserGuide' supplied on disc 2 of this upgrade.


What's new?
-----------

The following changes have been made to !Printers:

Between 0.33 and 1.22/24

1. 'background' printing.
   This very useful feature has been added to the printer manager. In
   effect, this causes printing to be directed to a spool file for files
   in the queue, after which the spool file is then sent to the printer
   as a background activity. Since not all applications support queueing
   of printing, this feature will not work with all applications.
   Background printing is an option selectable in the 'Connection'
   dialogue box.

   It should be realised, however, that spooling printer data to a file can
   result in very large files being created. This option should not,
   therefore, be used when !Scrap lives on a floppy disc. It should be
   treated as a hard-disc or network only option.

2. Improved colour printing support.
   Acorn has been working in conjunction with third parties to design and
   develop new ColourTrans and PDumperSupport modules. In addition to better
   colour rendition at the 256 colour level, the drivers now provide support
   for 24bpp colour rendition through the use of a three pass system. This
   is done transparently to the application and the user. Applications which
   can make use of this include Draw and Artworks. !Paint, and other similar
   sprite-based packages, will not print correctly in colour using 16
   million colours option. Sprites can be printed from !Draw if you want to
   print using this option.

   A substantial part of the colour printing flexibility comes from the use
   of a printer palette file. This copy of !Printers contains a general
   purpose palette file (!Printers.Palettes.0) which may not give quite as
   good results as some printer drivers from third party companies which
   have been produced for specific printers. New palette files can be
   created using the !RePro tool available from Oak Solutions.

   Note that if you *do* create your own palette file, you should save it
   with a palette file number of 10000 or higher to avoid clashes with any
   commercially produced palette files. You will also need to edit the
   graphics modes in the printer definition file so that they refer to your
   new palette file rather than palette file 0.

3. New and improved printer definition files.
   We have a number of new printer definition files for colour and black &
   white printers. Drivers for the Hewlett Packard Deskjet 500C, 550C and
   1200C have been included; the 550C driver will also work correctly for the
   Deskjet 310 colour. The BJC600 has been included as an additional PDF. New
   black and white dot matrix PDF's have been included for various printers.
   The Epson Stylus 800 has been included with its own PDF which will also
   support the other printers in the Stylus range. The original PDF's
   supplied have been improved to provide higher resolution colour printing
   options. The lists of supported printers supplied within each manufacturer
   directory have been significantly updated with information supplied or
   verified in most cases by the manufacturers to include nearly 300 printers
   in total.

4. Reduced disc swapping.
   Single floppy drive users have suffered in the past from the overlaying
   system employed in previous versions of the printer manager. For users of
   dot matrix or Laserjet class printers, the necessity to re-insert the
   printer driver disc has been removed. This should alleviate a lot of
   problems for the floppy disc system users within schools. When printing to
   PostScript printers it will, however, still be necessary to insert the
   original printer driver disc.

5. Sensible default options.
   The PDFs will now load with more popular default options selected.
   Printers that print in colour will now select colour and sensible
   resolution options when they are loaded thus reducing the amount of
   configuration required when the printer manager is first set up.

6. PostScript printing.
   Various changes have been made to PostScript printing, including
   standardising the PostScript output.

7. Printing with Acorn Access.
   !Printers has been updated for use with the new Acorn Access package. A
   new option from the Printer Control menu allows the 'Shared' option to be
   selected if Acorn Access is installed. Please refer to the Acorn Access
   notes for further information.

8. New templates.
   Both 2D and 3D templates are provided. Selection is dependant on the
   setting of bit 1 of byte &8C in CMOS RAM. There is therefore no
   requirement for the application to be updated with the sprites and
   template provided by !NewLook.

9. File Output.
   It is now possible, when printing to file, for subsequent output to be
   appended to previous output sent to the same file.

10. Printing 'Output' files.
    When printing 'Output' files created by printing with a dp class
    printer, the problem whereby an address exception could occur at the end
    of the print cycle has now been fixed.

11. Paper size editing.
    The 'Edit Paper Size' option now selects the paper type that is
    configured for that particular printer driver.

12. Cancelling a print job.
    When the Escape key is used to stop a print job the printer manager will
    now send a reset to the printer. It is therefore necessary to ensure that
    the printer is online when escape is pressed.

13. Loading PDFs.
    New PDFs loaded into the printer manager will now be automatically
    installed onto the icon bar so the user does not have to specifically
    make them active.

14. Look and feel.
    Various changes have been made to the printer manager to make it more
    Style Guide compliant, eg the removal of dbox close buttons and the
    addition of 'Cancel' buttons.

15. New structure to !System.
    !System has been enhanced so that it can now act as a container of
    shared resources for both RISC OS 2 and RISC OS 3 applications. If
    modules need to be released for specific versions of RISC OS (eg the
    ColourTrans module released with this disc) then it should be placed in
    the appropriate directory, ie !System.310.Modules for RISC OS 3.10 or
    later, or !System.Modules for RISC OS 2. Note that if a module can be
    used by all versions of the operating system, then it should continue to
    be placed in !System.Modules.

Between 1.22/24 and 1.28

1. Simple modification to the Epson 'ReadMe' file on the printers disc to
   include Epson Stylus Information.


2. When using !Printers with Acorn Access making a printer which is shared
   across the network inactive used to cause the printer manager to crash.


3. In the Risc PC where 32,000 colour quality is available one pixel was out
   of alignment. This is not noticeable to the normal eye!


4. Performing multiple prints in background mode used to cause the original file
   to be deleted.

5. When printing to file and entering a pathname manually the printer manager
   sometimes puts the file into the currently selected directory no matter what
   you have entered as the pathname.

6. When printing A3 to the BJC800 a white stripe would appear 2/3 of the way
   down the page.

7. If were accessing a shared printer (using Acorn Access) and you had specified
   a paper size other than the default, the printer manager didn't use this, but
   used the default size instead.

8. It was possible to for text print job to be ignored by a PostScript printer if,
   a) there were no carriage returns inserted manually or automatically at the end
   of lines and b) if the print job was scaled to less than 45%.

9. When printing from some software packages to some Deskjets compatibles (including
   the Acorn JP150 with version 1.03 code) the text would print right against the left
   side of the page ie. print margins were ignored.

10. When used on the Risc PC some characters within the configuration dialogue box were
    mis-aligned.

11. A CTRL-D is no longer appended to the end of an EPSF (Encapsulated PostScript) file.

Between 1.28 and 1.28c

1. The only difference between these two versions is support for the Epson Stylus
   Colour printer. There are two print modes on the Epson Stylus colour supported
   by two new definition files contained in the Epson directory on upgrade disc. The
   two new definition files are called 'Stylus-Col' and the second is called 'Stylus-Cmw'.

Stylus-Col

   This definition file supports the standard print mode with print resolutions up to
   720 x720 DPI. The default resolution selected is 360 x 360 DPI.

Stylus-Cmw

   This definition file supports the MicroWeave print mode with print resolutions up to
   720 x720 DPI. The default resolution selected is 360 x 360 DPI.  The MicroWeave mode
   seems to reduce banding quite significantly over the standard print mode.


Between 1.28c and 1.45 (1.45 Supplied in ROM on RISC OS 3.60 only)

1. Support for printing JPEG images from applications which automatically
   deal with JPEG images such as !Draw.


Between 1.45 and 1.52

 1. Improved printing speed for Bit image printer in both colour and black
    and white print modes.

 2. Support for HP EconoMode, Normal and Enhanced print options on newer
    printers.

 3. Specially tailored Palette files for specific printers offering improved
    colour rendition.

 4. Support for Epson Stylus Colour Normal and Microweave modes incorporated
    into one definition file.

 5. Support for new Epson Stylus printers (820, Pro, Pro XL and Colour II,
    IIs)

 6. PostScript Level 2 support.

 7. Support for PostScript printer that have multiple bins, allowing Duplex
    printing etc.

 8. New Canon printers supported in extended mode offering smoothing (360 x
    720) within software control.  Canon extended mode also requires the
    computer to use less memory when constructing the image and is quicker.

 9. Simplified quality options for newer printers.

10. Printer Definition Files can be double clicked on to load them.

!Printers 1.52 Issue 2

 a. Added new Canon Bubblejet PDF's
 b. Added new Deskjet 400 PDF
 c. Added new Epson LX-300 PDF

!Printers 1.52 Issue 3

 a. Added new LasJet4-PS PDF incorporating Level 3 PostScript support and
    Feeds files allowing Multi-bin access.

Between 1.52 and 1.53

 1. A New version of PDumperCX to support BJC 210 and BJC 4100.

 2. Fix a palette overloading problem (Problem only showed on RISC OS 3.60)

 3. New palette file (12) for BJC 210 (2 ink colour modes)

 4. Small Halftones re-instated, now called 'halftoned (fine)'.

 5. Included PDF's for Canon BJC 210, Canon BJC 4100, Epson Stylus-Pro and
    Epson Stylus Pro XL.

 6. Set Printer$Path and Printer$Dir 'Set' line to the !Run file.


Feedback
--------

If you experience any problems please contact us, preferably in writing, at the
address below with the following details:

 Å Printer being used.
 Å Version of firmware fitted to the printer.
 Å If the printer is Laserjet or PostScript,  how much memory is installed in
   the printer.
 Å Which Acorn computer system is being used.
 Å Full description of the problem including, preferably, a copy of the
   !Printer application, on disc, that is causing the problems.

Please send these details to Technical Support at Acorn Risc Technologies.



ACORN and the ACORN logo are trademarks of Acorn Computers Ltd.
PostScript is a trademark of Adobe Systems Inc.
LaserWriter is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc.
HP and LaserJet are trademarks of Hewlett Packard Corporation.
Citizen is a trademark of Citizen Watch Co. Ltd. Japan
Epson FX,LQ and MX are trademarks of Seiko Epson Corp.
Star and LC10 are trademarks of Star Micronics Co. Ltd
IBM and IBM Proprinter are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.
All other trademarks are acknowledged.