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OUTCHART.DOC
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1989-03-13
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OutChart v. 1.00
Opus's Chart Metafile Printer
-----------------------------------
by Doug Harrison
>>> Introduction
Everyone knows GDOS printer fonts take up, well, a shamefully
large amount of memory, especially the 300 DPI ones. Hence, Opus
only loads them when printing a chart, and it disposes of them
when the chart's done. This is necessary to allow a reasonable
amount of worksheet space on a 1 meg ST, but it does grow somewhat
tiresome waiting and listening to the drives whir and click as
they transfer the printer fonts for the tenth time. It's
especially a problem for someone pushing her ST's memory limits
with desk accessories, RAMdisks, etc.; some of these may have to
be disabled before Opus has enough free memory to print charts, a
scenario certain to alienate even the most tolerant. There just
had to be another way...
OutChart is a simple, friendly GEM program designed to print the
special .GEO chart metafiles Opus produces. It is not intended to
be a general purpose metafile player like Migraph's OutPrint;
rather, it understands one and only one variety of metafile, the
.GEO type, which contains special commands guaranteeing uniform
marker sizes and other information Opus needs to print the highest
quality charts. In fact, OutChart exactly duplicates Opus's
printing capability, so you may use it for all your chart printing
tasks without sacrificing any quality. Best of all, OutChart
requires only 30K or so of memory, leaving the rest for those
ravenous GDOS fonts.
>>> Running OutChart
First things first: GDOS or G+Plus must be present, and the
"PATH=" line in ASSIGN.SYS must point to the directory holding the
fonts and drivers. If you've already set up ASSIGN.SYS for Opus,
use the same file for OutChart. Possible disk configurations
follow:
A. Single floppy
- AUTO folder: GDOS.PRG or G+PLUS.PRG
- ASSIGN.SYS
- printer fonts and driver in directory indicated by
ASSIGN.SYS
- OUTCHART.PRG
B. Two floppies
1. Drive A
- AUTO folder: GDOS.PRG or G+PLUS.PRG
- ASSIGN.SYS
- printer fonts and driver in proper directory
March 12, 1989 OutChart v. 1.00
2. Drive B
- OUTCHART.PRG
C. Hard Drive
Place OUTCHART.PRG wherever you please.
Once executed, one of the first things OutChart does is load the
printer driver and fonts. Thus, if you have a single floppy, these
files must reside on your OutChart disk; regardless of drive
configuration, the fonts and driver must be available when you
load OutChart.
>>> The Menus
Under the File menu you will find the Quit item, and under the
Options menu, you may choose whether Outchart will pause between
pages. (I said it was a simple program!)
>>> The Desktop
OutChart's desktop consists of the Chart List, the Print icon, and
the Trash icon. The Chart List is arranged into two columns and
has places for up to eight files. The file boxes are implicitly
numbered 1-8, with number 1 at the upper left, number 2 just below
it, and so on. Printing proceeds in order from lowest to highest
number.
>>> Adding Names
To add a name to the list, click on the next available file box
(you may not skip file boxes) and select a .GEO file through the
file selector. Only the filename will appear in the box, but
OutChart remembers the full pathname. The box will also appear
highlighted, indicating that it will be affected by a subsequent
Print or Trash action. Of course, you may select/deselect defined
files by clicking on their file boxes.
>>> Printing
First, select the files you wish to print with the mouse, skipping
files if you like. Then, click on one of them without releasing
the mouse button and drag the "ghost boxes" to the Print icon,
which will light up as the mouse moves over it. Finally, release
the button to commence printing.
>>> The Trash
To remove files from the Chart List, select them and drag them to
the Trash icon. This doesn't delete the files from the disk; it
only removes them from the file list.
- 2 -
March 12, 1989 OutChart v. 1.00
>>> Shortcuts
Click on the Chart List title to select all defined files.
Click anywhere on the Desktop to deselect all defined files.
- 3 -