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1992-02-25
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9KB
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171 lines
The SLM804 INIT
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By Phillip White.
Ever since I had Spectre, the Mac emulator, up and running on my
Mega4 ST, I needed a means of printing directly to the Atari laser
printer in Mac mode. Dave Small cheerfully provided an Apple imagewriter
emulator for the SLM, but making a laser printer print 9 pin text and
graphics is nothing short of scandalous!
The alternative I was told, involved purchasing Ultrascript, a Postscript
interpreter for the ST (and PC) which would allow high quality
documents from the Mac to be printed on the venerable SLM.
A brief explanation is in order here for the blissfully ignorant.
Most laser printers are of the postscript variety. Postscript is a page
description language which allows the page of a computer typeset
document, to be interpreted as an exact series of instructions. Text and
graphics can be defined as a text file. Postscript is machine
independent, which means that for example, a document saved as a
postscript file on an Apple Mac, can be printed on a laser printer
connected to an IBM. Postscript files tend to be quite big.
A postscript laser printer must have it's own RAM and the fonts to match
the ones in the document, either installed in the printer itself or
downloaded from the computer. Until recently, postscript laser printers
were incredibly slow.
Atari, in their infinite wisdom, decided to abandon the concept of a
postscript printer (and thereby avoiding the licensing fees) and instead
opted for a 'dumb' printer. The idea was that the memory of the
computer would be used to draw up a page and then it would be zapped
to the printer. On the surface this is very meritable, the printer costs
less because there is no memory, the memory that would have been
there can now be used by the computer, there is no need to keep buying
font cartridges and the thing goes like the clappers.
The down side is that the SLM804 snaps up 1 meg of the ST's RAM and
the idea never caught on in the rest of the computer world, which meant
that the SLM was only good for the ST and nothing else (try trading one
in). A postscript printer will just about work with any computer, including an
ST.
Back to the Mac. There is some great DTP software for the Mac. The
trick is to get your documents to the SLM804 at 300 DPI. Spectre can't
print directly to the laser unless it thinks it is an imagewriter and quite
frankly, text does not look good at 10 dots an inch or whatever the
imagewriter klunks along at. We must save as a postscript file and print
the document on the SLM in ST mode.
To get the SLM to print postscript, we must use a Postscript interpreter.
One for the ST, is Ultrascript, by Imagen. Ultrascript requires it's own
fonts that must match those of the document being printed, also required
are the bold and italic variations, which can lead to having quite a few
fonts on board. Ultrascript works very well at interpreting most postscript
files, including IBM PC and ST generated ones, but it has not always been
smooth sailing as far as the Mac is concerned.
When saving a postscript file on the Mac, the Apple Laserwriter must be
installed as a chooser document, even though any attempt to print to it
will result in sorrow.
Originally to get postscript, one had to hold down the option key or
somesuch when OK'ing the print, and the file would be created. Later
on, a PD INIT was added which gave a save postscript file to disk button
on the printer dialogue box so this became easy as pie. When
Ultrascript dealt with a postscript file produced by this method, it
promptly kacked itself. What became the only means of printing to the
SLM, was importing all text and graphics into a well known DTP program
which for some reason or other, had better postscript functions, not a
problem there.
The next leap forward arrived in the form of a PD rescue for the ST. One
of Dave Small's mates had obviously thought about this problem and
written a postscript file for Ultrascript called Startup.PS. This was called
up by Ultrascript when a file was to be printed and basically allowed the
previously offending postscript files to print. One thing that it now
required was that no carriage returns be incorporated in the postscript
file, which meant that no font substitutions or alterations could be made
without going back into the Mac.
On the Mac front, System 7 gallantly championed it's cause, with a disk
of printing tools that once installed, gave a vastly enhanced print
dialogue box with lots of postscript options depending on the application
you were in. Things were finally starting to come together.
But there were still problems.....
Some applications still wouldn't play the game, particularly those which
didn't incorporate a graphic in a document, rather, a link is made to the
directory where the picture resides. In these cases the postscript file
would blow out to gargantuan proportions and Ultrascript would hang.
Besides the sheer hassle of...
1) Print file to disk as postscript.
2) Quit the Mac and become an ST again.
3) Run the Transverter program and copy the postscript file onto
an ST partition.
4) Run Ultrascript and print the file.
5) Oops there's no space between up and tight! back to the Mac again.
There had to be a better way.
About a year ago, I was perusing through the ACE Bulletin board when I
noticed a message which had been placed in an Atari Echo that
mentioned an INIT which would allow direct to SLM printing.
I jumped on this bit of news and established after some time that it was
available from a company in Germany called FEARN. There is also a
FEARN in California. The California connection was waiting for the release
of the US paper size version so I shifted my attention towards Germany.
Several enquiries around Australia revealed a total lack of knowledge for
this thing.
Eventually after much deliberation, I decided to go ahead and purchase
the INIT which costs 176 DM (I have not got the Visa invoice back yet).
A week later it was in my shaking mitts.
The SLM 804 INIT is an autobooting application which emulates the
Hewlett Packard Laserwriter II. It requires either a HP inkjet or
laserwriter printer driver for the Mac and adequate memory for the ST.
The creators are Gunther Walther & Frank Siegert.
The INIT basically intercepts a call to the laserjet and draws up a page
which is then sent to the SLM via the DMA port. The SLM normally
gobbles up 1 meg of memory and allowances must be made for this. I
had several crashes when I first installed the goodies and after
removing the ramdisk I customarily use, I could get to the desktop.
The manual pretty well explains what is needed for the operation of the
INIT, one of the requirements is for the system heap size to be increased
to allow extra room for the system. A PD program is provided for this
purpose. Also required is Adobe Type manager or I would suspect,
Truetype. This is to give smooth font scaling rather than smooth font
blockiness. This and all the associated fonts take up memory, so it is a
task to get the thing running.
Does it work? You bet! Although I had some slight problems with
kerning and spacing in some applications.
At the time of writing I have only had 2 days to try it and the initial
results look pretty good. The PD printer driver supplied is for a
Deskjet, which gives good results, but the Laserjet II Macprint driver is
recommended for superior quality, some fine tuning is to be expected.
Supplied on the disk are some PD utilities which I have no idea as to
what they do, and there is some update information in German which is
handy.
I do not know how many Spectre/SLM804 combinations there are in the
world, but this would certainly have to be an essential item for the
owners of these systems.
I would like to thank Swavek Jabrzemski, for his help in this saga.
SLM INIT is available from FEARN
JOHANNES KRAMER Str. 62
7000 STUGGART 70
W. GERMANY
Ph 0711 765 3049
Fax 0711 765 6411
Ask for Cabell, he speaks Californian