An automatic installer will be included with the final release of this driver, but is not included in this release. Instructions for installing PSWriter may be found in the "Apple Installation Notes" file in this folder. _Please_ read them.
This driver is a replacement for the LaserWriter driver. The working name is "PSWriter," but the driver will have a different name before final release. Please do not depend on the name "PSWriter" or use it in documentation.
This beta release of PSWriter does not support ColorSync. Apple and Adobe are working to incorporate support of ColorSync in this driver and will make such a version available as soon as possible.
• Image speed of this beta driver should be greatly improved over the LaserWriter.
• Most other documents should be comparable to LaserWriter speed.
• Note: ADDITIONAL PEFORMANCE ENHANCEMENTS WILL BE ADDED TO THIS DRIVER IN SUBSEQUENT BETA VERSIONS. THIS IS NOT THE FINAL DRIVER AND ANY PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKS OBTAINED WITH IT WILL NOT BE INDICATIVE OF PERFORMANCE OF THE FINAL PRODUCT.
Apple and Adobe have set up a special AppleLink address to accept bug reports on PSWriter. This beta release of PSWriter is available on AppleLink and on the November 1992 "Developer CD Series" disc. The sheer number of people who have access to this beta release makes it impossible to respond to feedback, though it will go to the engineering teams.
Please send all feedback concerning this driver to LWDRIVER.BUG on AppleLink.
Please do _not_ send feedback to other AppleLink addresses, but only to LWDRIVER.BUG.
Your feedback on this driver is heartily welcomed. Below we detail many of the problems we've already found, in case you run across them as well. You do not need to report anything already on this list.
This is a beta release of PSWriter; it is not yet of release quality. The following issues are already known to Apple and Adobe and all will be fixed prior to final (except as noted).
• Older system software
The driver is designed to work with all versions of System 6. The driver is not designed to work with earlier system software.
• Non-Roman systems (e.g. KanjiTalk)
Non-Roman script systems have an array of problems. Please do not test the driver with non-Roman systems at this point.
• Quadra 900
Occasional problems with Quadra 900's have been seen in internal tests. Please help us by reporting any reproducable problems you may find on this system.
• Macintosh Portable
The driver will crash when used on an Macintosh Portable within the Chooser dialog.
• All Systems
In situations where RAM memory is low (unavailable to PSWriter), PSWriter may crash.
• Personal LaserWriter NTR
Some TrueType fonts will restart the Personal LaserWriter NTR. All Type 1 fonts work fine.
• Applications
Applications which rely on the presence of LaserPrep sometimes crash when used with PSWriter. Known applications with this problem are Cricket Draw, ReadySetGo 4.5, Design Studio 2.0, and Publish It-Easy. Versions of QuarkXpress earlier than 3.1 will crash also. More recent versions of some of these applications do not exhibit this problem.
This list is a summary of the known bugs within the version 8.0b1 of PSWriter.
• EPS files with preview which include text with styling (e.g. shadowing) may not be positioned correctly within bounding box.
• Pattern control is missing from the print options dialog.
• Support for custom page sizes available on some printers and imagesetters not yet implemented.
• Optimization remains to be done to reduce the total memory required at any one time. This driver should run on most systems in its current form.
• Printing TrueType Kanji fonts causes a bus error.
• Printing Kanji bitmapped fonts fails occasionally.
• Opening a document in MS Works, and placing the cursor into the text of the document, you get the watch cursor rather than the I-beam cursor.
• EPS/Pict files not created with proper bounding box around Polygons, Arcs and Lines. MacDraw II can generate the failure.
• Printing from the desktop in Microsoft Word and Illustrator (and probably or possibly others as well) will cause the application to remain open, rather than close it as 7.1.1 does. Workaround: manually quit the application when you're done printing
• First page of MS Word document not printing correctly after graphic in header.
• From MS Excel 4.0, printing in foreground, command-period must be entered twice to cancel a job.
• With the PPD folder is located in the System Folder (not in the Extensions folder), go into the Chooser and perform an ‘Auto Setup.’ Select the ‘Select PPD...’ button and choose the Default or Generic PPD. Select the ‘Select PPD...’ button again. Result: Upon selecting ‘Select PPD...’ button the parser defaults to the Extensions folder.
• Unable to print simple text file from using standard issue Arabic TrueType fonts.
• Unable to print simple TeachText file under Hebrew system
• Printing a simple text document under Greek system results in incorrect line layout.
• Full justified text on screen does not print full justified with 7.01 Arabic.
• International characters are not printed on Fax cover sheet.
• Including an EPS image in another EPS image can cause problems.
• When printing a simple file containing Ayuthaya font, the Thai character text is scrambled.
• Confusing message in the status dialog during an auto setup.
• Icon placement in the Chooser ‘LDEF’ for right to left systems is on the wrong side.
• Information contained in the Chooser Dialog "Printer Information" is not justified correctly for right to left systems Text is always left justified when on some systems (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) it should be right justifed.
• Need to standardize the placement of the PSWriter icon in the print and status dialogs.
• Length of Underline is shorter than string in b1.
• In MS Word (4.0d or 5.0), the solid black bar around the 'OK' button in the Page Setup window remains solid (and black) when ever the 'Document' button is
selected.
• Page Setup Options window is slightly clipped by the menu bar in Lotus 1 2 3.
• Reduce the number of paper sizes available in the generic PPD.
The list of paper sizes availathe Generic PPD should be reduced to:
Letter
Legal
A4
B5
• FrameRoundRect image different from QuickDraw rendered image. The inner rectangles are quite different. The image produced by QuickDraw has regular inner rectangles (90 degree angle) while the image produced by PSWriter has rounded corner rectangles
• White Knight can't print using the PSWriter driver. 1. Open White Knight. Connect to a service or type some text. 2. Select some text. Type Command-P to print. 3. Dialog says that it's printing, but you can now wait until the end of time and nothing will come out of the printer, nor will the print dialog ever go away.
• redundant (or duplicated) paper sources for Laserwriter NTR paper feed. Select LaserWriter NTR. open job dialog and select paper sources in Paper Feed. both Auto feed and Upper uses paper in the casette tray. Lower and ManualFeed uses paper in the multipurpose tray
• The wait cursor should be a pointer cursor 1. Disconnect printer from CPU. 2. Print any document to the printer. 3. Soon afterwards, a dialog is displayed on the screen informing unavailability of printer. 4. Note that a wait cursor is used even long after the dialog is displayed on the screen. A pointer cursor should be used instead.
• Graphics object is not printed when foreground color is classic white and background color is classic yellow on level 1 printer. This object is printed correctly on a level 2 printer.
• The feature of Larger Print Area (Fewer Downloadable Fonts) always grays out with PPD files of LaserWriter, LaserWriter IIf, LaserWriter IIg and LaserWriter Personal NTR; however, it always highlights with other PPD files. 1. Select the Chooser, select the PSWriter driver and choose a LaserWriter, a LaserWriter IIf, a LaserWriter IIg or a LaserWriter Personal NTR. 2. Click on the Set Up button, it will take you to the Automatic Printer Set Up dialog, make sure the right PPD file is chosen rather than the Default PPD then click the OK button. Close the Chooser window. 3. Under the File pulldown menu, select the Page Set Up feature, it will take you to the PSWriter Page Set Up dialog click on the Options button and it will show you the window of PSWriter Options. Take a look at the option of Larger Print Area (Fewer Downloadable Fonts) it is graying out. It always grays out with all of the drivers and printers listing above; however, it always highlights with other PPD files and the Default PPD File.
• "Print Detailed Report" of errors is missing details. 1. Type Command-P to print. Click Options button. 2. Select "Print Detailed Report". 3. Print some documents. If one or more documents are bad, you'll get output along the lines of: “ERROR: ioerror
OFFENDING COMMAND: mytextdrawprep STACK: 0 neg Height 0 0 Width [ etc.” Important missing details are the name of the document and the name and type of printer it was printed on.
• Continously calling LineTo with pen size 1 at different location (each frame 1 point apart), using Bitmap Alignment 4% reduction option shows obvious incorrect output (7.1.1 driver OK).
• Personal LaserWriter NT should have the same paper source information as NTR in its PPD file.
• "Manual Feed" should be as seen here, with a space, for all the PPDs.
• In the LaserWriter IIf PPD, the "ON" selection for PhotoGrade™ should be grayed out for 4 mg as well as 2 mg configuration.
• In all PPDs, Letter and Legal should be US Letter and US Legal, as in generic PPD.
• Add 2 envelope sizes to each Apple PPD: Commercial #10 and Monarch.
• Not able to print a Finder Window when font substitution and scaling are active. When printing a Finder Window with many entries by name, printer returns a PostScript error. Usually returns:
ERROR: invalidfont
OFFENDING COMMAND: show
Has also returned:
ERROR: undefined
OFFENDING COMMAND: mov1
Finder Font is Geneva 9 point; however, System contains TrueType only.
• Chooser crashes on Mac Portable w/7.1 and b1.
• Grayed items should also have their check boxes grayed
• Printing WINGZ test file in color/grayscale with PSWriter takes over 4 times as long as with 7.1.1
• Power Pt., Canvas, Resolve, Excel, Delta Graph Pro, WINGZ & MORE do not retain letter paper setting when changing from PSW to 7.1.1. This can cause some unusual printouts with Power Pt & Canvas.
• Freehand 3.1 does not create driver EPS files that can be printed.
• Using Word's Picture command, creating a graphic with polygons, then cropping the graphic, results in the polygons printing outside the cropped area.
• Print-Options dialog box should resize based upon size of monitor.
• Page setup defaults to other & orientation is reversed.
• HP Series III PPD files work with a3 but not with a4. PPD's for III from PPD.sit are not accepted by the driver.
• Print Dialog status shows spooling activity even though background printing is off. Print Dialog job status shows "number of pages spooled xx", which gives the user the impression that the driver is doing background processing, even though background printing is turned off.
• Installer doesn't allow installation on systems earlier than 6.0.7.
• Summarize on screen option for error reporting does not work when Foreground printing is enabled
• Multiple document selection and printing from the finder causes the driver to crash
with an out of memory error.
• Printing large TIFF-encoded bitmapped images from PageMaker 4.2 (using our driver
instead of the Aldus driver) consistently causes timeout errors and hangs the printer.
• SuperPaint 3.0 does not work with this driver. SuperPaint does not follow the specified
method of interaction with the driver. Adobe is working with Aldus to resolve this.
• The proper page size (Letter, Legal, etc) will not be recognized when a
landscape document is reopened. The page size selected will be "Other".
