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1995-04-22
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PRINT SHOP LABEL MAKER
by JAMES PIERSON-PERRY
(synopsis)
Transfer nearly any Print Shop image to stick-on labels
along with your own text. To use this BASIC program, you
need an 8-bit Atari with minimum 48K memory, disk drive,
printer that's compatible with Epson or Prowriter and some
Print Shop files. You can use any Print Shop image except
those on your original Print Shop disk. (These won't work
because they use a different data format.)
My five-year-old daughter bet me I couldn't make my
Atari 800 produce fancy name stickers for her and her
sisters. "They must have pictures," she said. I'm no
artist, so spending several evenings designing bit-mapped
graphics was not my idea of fun.
But why not use Broderbund's Print Shop graphics? With
a virtually unlimited selection of images, at least one of
them had to be acceptable to my juvenile taskmaster.
The resulting program is Designer Labels, which lets you
create and print your own customized Print Shop labels or
stickers -- each one with a graphic image and as many as
seven lines of text in a standard or redefined font.
Designer Labels will work with any image from the Print
Shop Graphics Library disks. You may also use pictures
created with KoalaPad or Micro-Painter and converted into
Print Shop format with Graphic Shop (The Catalog).
Uses for Designer Labels include return address labels
for local businesses, bookplates, canning labels, emergency
telephone number stickers, and, of course, hundreds of
children's name stickers -- all brightly colored and stuck on
most walls in my house.
MAKING LABELS
Download PSLABELS.BAS with XMODEM.
When you RUN Designer Labels, the title screen is
displayed for about 40 seconds while the machine language
routines are installed and the buffer strings are
initialized. You are then prompted to select a printer type.
Let's create a test label to see how the program works.
You begin with a blank label image shown at the top of the
screen. The edit menu has five choices:
1. Get a NEW GRAPHIC image
2. ENTER TEXT for the label
3. CHANGE TEXT font
4. PRINT LABELS
5. EXIT from program
Press [OPTION] to highlight NEW GRAPHIC, then press
[START]. At the prompt, insert into drive 1 a Print Shop
Graphics Library (or compatible) disk. Type in the name of
the graphic -- for example, KNIGHT from the Print Shop
Graphics Library I. Press [START] again and the icon is
displayed in the label image area. If the icon is not on the
disk, a "Not Found" message is printed and you can try again.
To add text, select ENTER TEXT from the edit menu and
type the text as you want it to appear on the label. This is
a "what you see is what you get" operation. Upper and lower
case letters, numbers, punctuation signs and graphic symbols
are all valid text characters. Hold down [CONTROL] and use
the arrow keys to move the cursor within the text input box.
Press [TAB] to center the current text line in the box.
[CLEAR] will blank the current text line. [DELETE] gets rid
of the last text character entered. When you're satisfied
with the text layout, press [ESC]. This starts a machine
language routine that translates the characters into the
appropriate bit maps and displays them in the Graphics 8
label image.
DEFINE YOUR OWN
The label is almost done, but we can add another touch.
If you have a disk with redefined character fonts such as
Instedit (The Catalog), you can use it with Designer Labels.
The font files must have .FNT as the filename extension.
Select the NEW FONT option, insert the disk containing the
fonts and type the file name (only the first eight characters
-- the .FNT will be appended automatically). If you don't
want a new font, the default is the internal ROM character
set. This set can also be accessed by entering INTERNAL as
the new font file name.
The last step is to print your creation. Select PRINT
LABELS, make sure your printer is on, and insert the label
forms into the printer. The program spacing is set for a
standard 1 X 3 1/2 inch label size (about $7 for a box of
1,000). Enter the number of labels to print (maximum of 99)
and press [START] to begin.
You'll probably need to play with the print head
positioning so that the labels have proper spacing. If you
print a series of different labels, make sure to readjust the
printhead for each set or the spacing may be incorrect. My
Prowriter requires about 14 minutes to print 99 labels.
All done? Now you can EXIT PROGRAM from the edit menu
to return to BASIC, or go on to create some more new custom
labels.
MANUFACTURERS
PRINT SHOP LIBRARY Volumes I, II, III Broderbund
Software 17 Paul Drive San Rafael, CA 94903 (415) 479-1170
$24.95 each
GRAPHIC SHOP The Catalog AP0156 $19.95
INSTEDIT The Catalog AP0117 $15.95
(bio)
The two previous Antic articles by DuPont research
chemist James Pierson-Perry of Elkton, Maryland have been a
lot more science-oriented than this one. We published his
Molecular Weight Calculator in May 1986 and Response Surface
Mapping in December 1986.