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!LazyPrint 6 March 1997 Version 2.38 Page Contents 2 Introduction 3 Tutorial - getting Started 4 Reference - on printing text files 6 Control Codes in text 7 Printing Graphic (Draw or Sprite) files 10 Definition files, Choices, FontList, PageList 13 Utilities, LPPrint, CSV2Labels, Thickline, !LazyCodes 14 Comments 15 Fault Reporting and enhancement requests 16 Address for Correspondence Introduction !LazyPrint sends simple text, Draw files or Sprites to a Hewlett Packard (HP) printer or plotter quickly using the HP printer hardware fonts and languages, (PCL 5 which includes the vector graphics language HP-GL/2). It allows easy selection of printer parameters such as paper orientation, margin sizes and hardware fonts for text printing jobs such as program listings, simple letters and address labels. Draw and Sprite files can be printed at any magnification and position on the page in colour or black-and-white. Text files can only be printed in black because they are printed using the PCL language which has no way of defining colour. !LazyPrint is NOT a printer driver, it only sends files to the printer. It does not communicate with other programs so can only be used from word processors or Desktop Publishing packages if they can save to Text or Draw files. You can drop a file on to the !LazyPrint icon directly from an application such as !Edit, !Draw or !Paint. Acorn interactive help is supported. There are three choices files you can change with any text editor; full descriptions are given later; the files are: ‘Choices’ determines the initial settings of the layout parameters ‘FontList’ a list of available hardware fonts in your Hewlett Packard printer ‘PageList’ a list of page size name and dimensions known to the printer. Four utilities are included in the registered version: (shareware users get just the first of the ones below) 1 - sending ‘printout’ files directly to the printer 2 - formatting CSV files into a file for printing address labels 3 - making lines thicker in Draw files 4 - !LazyCodes an aid to help users enter control codes into text files Typing Conventions: < > around a word mean press that key, for example <Select> is the left mouse button <Return> is the ‘Return’ key on the keyboard. Menu items are like this Queues icons are shown like this Copies. Filenames are within ‘’ like this ‘Choices’ Ends of sections are shown like this _____________________________ Ends of sub-sections like this _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __________________________________________________________________________ Tutorial - Getting Started First look at the file ‘Readme’, then at the file ‘Copyright’ which is within the !Lazyprint application, then either drag the !LazyPrint icon to a filer window on a directory of your hard disk to install the program or double click on the !LazyPrint icon to load the application on to the Icon Bar. To print a text file: first choose the page layout you want by clicking <Select> over the icon on the icon bar to show a window where you can select one of the supplied layouts, or change the parameters to suit your application. Further details of these layout parameters are in the next section Text Layout Parameters. Click on ‘OK’ to close the window. Then drag the file to the !LazyPrint icon on the icon bar, and it is sent straight to the printer. Try any of your text files and the default layout supplied, if you are happy with the results you may never need to read the rest of this manual. To print a graphic file drop the file on to the icon on the icon bar, this opens a window which allows scaling and positioning of the image on the page. (Details given later) In both cases the output may be printed immediately, or sent to a file of type ‘printout’ (FF4), which can later be sent to the printer by double-clicking over it provided that the !LazyPrint application has been ‘seen’ by the filer. This can be useful for frequently printed files. The menu from the icon on the icon-bar has the following entries: Info shows the version number Help displays the !Help file (interactive help is also provided) Pause temporarily stops sending data to the printer Stop stops sending information to the printer and clears the queues Fast sends the file to the printer more quickly by demanding more time from the Wimp. By default, !LazyPrint only uses whatever is left after all other tasks have run Queues displays the file names queued for printing Save choices updates the Choices file with the current conditions Quit removes the program from the desktop. Start by trying to print the files in the directory ‘examples’: First text files - filename Layout used Contents 1) ‘Manual’ Manual this file 2) ‘MyLetter’ Letter a typical letter 3) ‘MyDiscs’ Disc Labels a set of 3.5" disk labels containing only text 4) ‘MyLabels’ Labels 7x3 a page of address labels for the Avery format 5) ‘Chars128’ Manual tests printing of ASCII characters between 128 and 159 Then graphic files - 6) ‘Shades’ a Draw file with the desktop colours in 2 forms: as a Sprite and as filled rectangles. 7) ‘ThinBoxes’ a Draw file with several widths of white line on a dark background if you cannot see the ‘Thin’ one you may want to use the utility ‘Thicklines’ described below __________________________________________________________________________ Reference - on Printing Text Files Text layout parameters Window This window has several parts where related icons are enclosed in boxes to show they form a group; the boxes control page layout, requested paper size, margin positions etc. Yellow background icons can only be changed by clicking on them with the mouse. White ones can have numbers typed into them from the keyboard. Boxes on the left side of the window: Page Layout (top left box) Icons are described from top to bottom of the box. You can choose: 1) to print page numbers in one of six possible positions (top/bottom and left/middle/right/) The icon positions show you where page numbers appear on the page, for example, if you want a page number in the middle of the bottom line of the page, select the centre icon of the 3 at the bottom of the box. A blank line is printed after the line containing the page number at the top of the page, and before it at the bottom. 2) to print a heading on the top line consisting of the complete file name and file creation date. When the page number is at the top of the page, the header and page number are printed on the same line, so only two extra lines are needed. When the page number is at the bottom of the page, and you ask for a header, the top two lines are taken for the header itself and its following blank line, and also two more lines at the bottom for the page number. 3) to print line numbers at the left side of the page, this is sometimes useful for program listings. It is printed with up to 4 digits, followed by a¸ blank , when the line number exceeds 9999, it starts again at 1. 4) the page orientation (portrait or landscape) <select> the icon of the desired shape 5) whether the output should be sent direct to the printer or to a file for printing later 6) how the paper should be fed to the printer. The three possibilities are to take: - all the sheets from the feed hopper, - each sheet from the manual feed, - odd numbered sheets from the hopper, even ones from the manual feed. This allows double-sided printing. Copies (bottom left box) Set the number of copies to be printed by typing in the icon. Paper Size (bottom row) This shows the current paper size expected, A4 for the ‘Manual’ Layout by default, but you may want to print envelopes or other sizes. Click with <select> over this icon to see the list of possible paper sizes set up for your printer. The current one has a tick by it. Its dimensions can be seen by moving the pointer to the right; these are read from the file ‘Pagelist’; you must edit that file to change them. (Instructions are given later for how to edit this file and to add more paper sizes.). Boxes on the right side of the window: Page Margins(top right box) The 4 icons show the current margin settings for the top, left, right and bottom margins. They are measured in mm from the edge of the paper, not from the edge of the printable area. Notes: 1. No check is made on the line lengths; if they are too long to fit on to the page, the extra characters are lost without warning. 2. The right margin is used only to set up multi-column positions it does not stop the printing. Tab positions( 2nd box down on the right) The 4 tab positions are measured in millimetres from the left edge of the paper; click with <select> over any you want to change; type in the number you want and press the <Return> key. The numbers in the icons are forced to increase from one tab position to the next, but no check is made that the tabs are not off the right hand edge of the paper. Number of lines and columns(the boxes in the 3rd row down) Type the number you want into the icons for the number of lines/inch or the number of lines/page.These numbers are not independent; changing one will affect the other. They also depend on the paper size and orientation, and whether you want a page number and header. Enter the number of columns to print in the icon in the Columns box. This is useful when printing labels; where the left and right margin settings position the text on the labels. Note: The tab positions for single column (and the first position for multi-column) are measured from the edge of the paper. For later columns they are measured from a position calculated as the starting position for that column minus the left unprintable width. Font setup ( 4th box down on the right) Up to four different fonts may be used in any one document. These are numbered from 1 to 4 the last three being accessed by control codes embedded in the text (see section on Control codes below). Click <select> over the appropriate font number to open a window with icons showing the font name, size and alternate characteristics. Click any button over the font name to select the font and then change its point size and characteristics (Bold, italic or condensed). The fonts available are stored in the file ‘FontList’ which is described later. One point = 1/72 inch. New Layout, Reset, OK (Icons on the bottom line of the window) To save the layout for future use, click over New Layout; this makes another window showing all the layouts currently stored in the ‘Choices’ file. To add a new layout, enter its name in the white icon inside the box, click over the ‘create’ icon and then the OK. Previously created layouts can be selected in this window by double-clicking over their name, they can also be renamed or deleted. The maximum number of layouts is 12. To keep your new layout for future use, select ‘Save Choices’ from the icon-bar menu. Reset is used when you have changed some of the parameters in an existing layout and want to reset all of them to the values stored for the layout of that name in the ‘Choices’ file. OK Click here to close this window and make !Lazyprint ready to print a file. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Control codes in text The PCL language uses a main font and a secondary font; !LazyPrint similarly uses a main font and secondary font with control codes embedded in the text to change from one font to another in text files. In addition there are a few layout codes such as ‘start a new page’. Control codes are ASCII characters with values less than 32. !Lazy Print recognises: Code Keys Meaning [09] (CTRL/I) move to next tab position [0c] (CTRL/L) skip to next page (must be the only character on the line) [0e] (CTRL/N) use secondary font rather than font 1 [0f] (CTRL/O) use font 1 [11] (CTRL/Q) select font 1 as the secondary font [12] (CTRL/R) select font 2 as the secondary font [13] (CTRL/S) select font 3 as the secondary font [14] (CTRL/T) select font 4 as the secondary font [15] (CTRL/U) start underlining text [17] (CTRL/W) end underlining text Notes 1. All other control codes (apart from ‘newline’ and ‘end of data’ [04]) are ignored. ‘Newline’ is obeyed; ‘end of data’ stops processing of the file at that point, after displaying a warning message and asking whether to print the page up to that position. 2. The application !LazyCodes makes a window (similar to the system one !chars), which allows easy entry of these control characters into a text file being edited by clicking over icons. (Only for registered users) 3. If you are using !SrcEdit as your text editor you should not have any text selected when trying to add the ‘skip to next page’ code [0c], because this causes an error message ‘No file found to match selection’ and does not add the [0c]. 4. Some of the ‘control codes’ with the top bit set (ASCII 128 to 159) are printed using the Acorn defined conventions. These are: ASCII: 140 141 143 144 145 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 symbol: … ™ • ‘ ’ “ ” „ – — − Œ œ † ‡ ﬁ ﬂ All the others in this set (of 128 to 159) are printed as a space. These characters can easily be entered into a file using !chars in the standard way. Try printing file ‘examples.Chars128’ to see how your printer handles them. __________________________________________________________________________ Reference - on Printing Graphic files Dropping a graphic file (a Draw file or a Sprite) on to the icon bar icon opens a window showing how !LazyPrint transfers the graphic area to paper. The window has several parts: 1 - a large rectangle representing the printable area of the paper 2 - a set of icons enclosed in a box for page layout options 3 - a set of icons for image rendering Positioning the graphic on the page The printable ‘paper’ area is shown as a large grey rectangle, surrounded by a white border, with tick marks every cm. The 0 shows the origin is at the lower left corner. !LazyPrint selects the best orientation of the paper depending on whether the width or height is bigger, and by default, scales the size to make the graphic just fit into the paper. You can change the orientation by clicking on an icon inside the Page Layout area; when you are looking at a portrait orientation rectangle the icon contains the word landscape, when the rectangle is in landscape orientation, it changes to portrait. The image position is shown by a black outline box on the grey printable area of the white paper. The image always keeps its original aspect ratio. While the icon unscaled is not selected, the image remains inside the grey area and its size and position on the paper can be changed. Move the outline box by dragging a point in the middle. Change its size by dragging any corner; the two sides adjacent to the corner change to red while you drag the corner. Selecting unscaled allows you to print the graphic at its natural size and position on the paper, or if it is a large picture, you can drag part of it outside the printable area of the paper and print separate parts and then stick them together. Other Page Layout Parameters As with text files the output can be sent directly to the printer or to a file and the paper be fed automatically from the hopper or manually. Select the number of copies (1 to 9) either by typing into the box or by clicking on the ‘up’ and ‘down’ icons. The current paper size is shown in the box, click menu over the size to see the other possible paper sizes defined for your printer in the file ‘Pagelist’ (see later) Rendering Icons in this box govern how sprites are printed; by default colours are printed as grey levels. Only select the colour icon if you want to print graphics or text on a colour printer. Select the icon black text to print all text in black regardless of its colour in the Draw file. This parameter has no effect on text in a Sprite, whether inside a Draw file or being printed by itself. Laser printers make grey levels (and represent colours) by printing different sized dots at different densities. Click on the icon half tone to vary these sizes to get the best appearance of grey shades on your printer. The menu allows you to: 1) set the number of dots/inch available on your printer (do not use a higher value than that available on your printer; the default supplied is 300dpi; a lower one can be used to speed up the printing for a draft copy but it makes a coarser rendering), 2) set the size of the half-toning blobs. The larger the blobs the more levels in the grey-scale can be represented but the coarser the rendering. Moving over the arrows in the blobs menu shows you the characteristics of the rendering. Finally, click OK to print the file or Cancel to abandon the printing. Notes: 1) The HP-GL/2 language defines only eight shading patterns for grey-level area filling. Filled Areas in Draw files can only use these 8 grey levels. Sprites are printed differently and can have many more than 8 levels. Print the Draw file ‘Shades’ to see the problem. 2) Dashed lines are printed with end-caps only at the beginning and end of the line, not at the end of each dash as is done by !Draw and the printer drivers. 3) Text in Draw files is rendered by choosing a printer resident font which looks similar to the RISC-OS font. The correspondences defined in the ‘FontList’ file (described later) are reasonably accurate. When Arial is printed where there is Homerton in the Draw file, both letters and spacing look similar to that in the Draw file. Unfortunately some printers do not have Arial; Univers should be used instead. Although the Univers letter shapes are similar to those in Homerton, spaces are much wider; this may cause problems. 4) Text in Draw files is printed using HP-GL/2, which prints much more slowly than text printed using PCL. Draw files containing large amounts of text will print more slowly than a page with a similar amount of text in a text file. 5) Higher resolution laser printers, for example 600 bpi, or colour inkjets may appear to lose very thin white lines printed over a coloured or black area. This is because the toner or ink tends to spread a little, and it may be enough to obscure a very thin line. If you find this, try running the utility ‘ThickLine’ on your Draw file as described later. Printing of colour in graphic files. Colours are translated to grey-levels using the NTSC video standard translation for black-and-white printers: grey = 0.3*red + 0.59*green + 0.11*blue with ‘grey’ in the range [0:1] which is then printed with half-tone dots. Select the ‘colour’ icon to print in colour when using a colour printer. Do NOT select it when using a black-and-white printer. Coloured text can be hard to read when rendered by shading on a black-and-white printer; force all text to print in black by clicking on the Black text icon. You can also print all text in black on colour printers by selecting this icon Sprite rendering. Sprites must be aligned with the axes of the paper. This means that rotations of 90, 180 and 270 degrees, reflections and magnifications of a Sprite are understood. Any other rotations will be rejected. Sprite masks are ignored by !LazyPrint. !LazyPrint was designed to print text and Draw files quickly, printing large Sprites is time consuming and not recommended but it can be convenient to print small ones, for example ones which show a company Logo in a letterhead. Printing Disk Labels 3.5" disk labels can be printed either as text, using the layout ‘DiskLabels’, as in the text file supplied ‘MyDisks’, or as mixed text and graphics using Draw files. The file ‘docs.DiskGrid’ contains a grid drawn with red lines designed as a template for use with Avery labels (type L7664). When designing a new set of Disk Labels to be printed as a Draw file, start by copying ‘DiskGrid’ to your new file, then design your label to fit into one of the larger boxes. The dotted line marks the position of the edge of the disk, the smaller rectangle is the part of the label on the back of the disk. Remember if you print on this part you may want the text to be rotated by 180 degrees. When your label is complete, group the parts of the design together and copy to the rest of the positions in the grid. Lastly erase the red grid and print your labels using the ‘unscaled’ option in the Draw file rendering window, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Printing Sprite files This is the same as printing Draw files except that if the Sprite file contains more than one Sprite you will first be asked to select the one you want to print. ‘Black text’ has no effect on text rendering in Sprites. __________________________________________________________________________ Definition files in the application Three printer dependent files ‘Choices’, ‘Fontlist’, and ‘Pagelist’ are provided to tell !LazyPrint the characteristics of your printer and how to set the default values of the layout parameters. File 1 ‘Choices’ This contains a line of configuration information written by the application, followed by pairs of lines defining up to 12 different Layouts. You can change it with an editor but it is much easier to let !LazyPrint do it via the ‘Save Choices’ option in the icon bar menu. The layouts supplied are ‘DiskLabels’, ‘Env. D/L’, ‘Labels 7x3’, ‘Letter’, ‘Line printer’, ‘Listing132’ and ‘Manual’. ‘DiskLabels’ uses Univers font to print text on labels for 3.5" floppy disks on special stationery with 4 labels in each of 2 columns on an A4 sized page. (Avery type L7664) The labels are 2.75" wide and 2.83" high. 17 lines are printed per label. The example text file ‘MyDisks’ was used with this layout, which expects you to feed the labels pages manually. Labels can also be printed from Draw files as described earlier. ‘Env. D/L’ is for printing addresses on D/L envelopes (the sort often used for A4 paper folded into three). The standard font is Arial 12 point with the alternate font being the same but bold, and used for emphasis words, usually town names, which are all in upper case letters. ‘Labels 7x3’ uses the Univers font in point size 12 to print address labels on special stationery with 7 labels in each of 3 columns on an A4 sized page (Avery type L7160). The labels are 2.5" wide and 1.5" high, with 9 lines per label. The example text file ‘Mylabels’ was used with this layout, which expects you to feed the labels pages manually. To adapt this layout for labels with a different number of lines per label you change the lines per inch, the margins and the number of columns until you get the layout you want on your new labels; there is no way to set the number of lines per label. ‘Letter’ uses ‘Times’ font in 12 pt to print a simple letter with TAB characters to space out the address lines . An example letter is in the file ‘Myletter’. The alternate font 2 is Italic, font 3 is Bold, font 4 is ‘Marigold’ ‘Line Printer’ is intended for making a compact listing of a program source using the ‘lineprinter’ font, which is a fixed size. This prints short lines, of about 80 characters per line, in landscape orientation, with 2 columns of text per page and a page number and header consisting of the full directory name of the file printed in 10pt Bold Letter Gothic. ‘Listing 132’ prints files with lines with up to 132 characters in portrait orientation with one column of text per page using the ‘Lineprinter’ font, and a similar header line to that printed by ‘Line printer’. If you ask for ‘2-sided’, it stops every other page and expects you to feed the page it has just printed back in again. ‘Manual’ used for printing out this manual, prints lines using the Arial font, which approximates to the Acorn Homerton one, it has page numbers at the bottom of the page. 52 lines per page, with spacing 5 lines per inch. It is printed ‘2-sided’, so stops every other page to allow you to feed back into the printer the page which has just come out so that it can be printed on the other side. Hint: If you want to make text files using !Edit for this layout try setting the display font to Homerton, point size 12, and both the Edit and display lengths to 90 characters. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ File 2 ‘FontList.’ !LazyPrint does not interrogate the printer to find out which hardware fonts are present. Instead it uses the file ‘FontList’, which is in two parts, each with a maximum of 20 lines, terminated by a blank line. The first part is a list of all the available HP hardware fonts, one line per font, the second the translation of Acorn to HP fonts used for Draw file printing. Only 3 translations are in the supplied ‘Fontlist’ file: Homerton (to Arial), Trinity (to Times New Roman) Corpus (to Courier). These translations are reasonably accurate but you might want to add others for your own favourite Draw font. This part terminates either with a blank line or the end-of-file. Compare the list in the file ‘FontList’ with that printed on your printer test page, edit out any which are not in your printer, and add any extra ones you may have. Warning: the layouts set up in the ‘Choices’ file expect fonts to be listed in a fixed order. Additional ones should be added at the end of the list. Check that all the stored layouts in the ‘Choices’ file have the correct font with your edited file ‘FontList’. The supplied ‘FontList is: Font name HP code type allowed Albertus 4362 1B 1 Antique Olive 4168 1BI Clarendon 4140 1 2 Coronet 4116 1 7 Courier 4099 0BI Garamond Antiqua 4197 1BI Letter Gothic 4102 0BI3 LinePrinter 0 0 4 Marigold 4297 1 CG Omega 4113 1BI CG Times 4101 1BI Univers 4148 1BIC Arial 16602 1BI Times New Roman 16901 1BI Symbol 16668 1 5 Wingdings 31402 1 6 Homerton 0.705 1.0 Arial Trinity 0.709 0.965 Times New Roman Corpus 0.713 0.967 Courier Format of each line of the first part 1) The first 16 characters give the font name as seen in the Font selection window 2) The next 7 characters are the typeface command (as given in the 3rd column in table D-6 in the HP users manual) 3) Two blanks (ignored but necessary) 4) 4 Characters defining: 0 or 1 for mono- or proportional spacing B for bold is allowed I for italic is allowed C for condensed is allowed or one of the following special flags in the 4th place: 1 (Albertus has 1 extra added to the boldness i.e 1/4, not 0/3) 2 (Clarendon is only condensed) 3 (Letter Gothic is not allowed bold and italic) 4 (LinePrinter is fixed pitch, 16.67 and height, 8.5) 5 (Symbol needs 19M symbol set) 6 (Wingdings needs 579L symbol set) 7 (Coronet has only an italic font) Format of each line of the second part This has the primary Acorn font name (without the ‘oblique’ or ‘bold’) Font names must be a maximum of 12 characters, followed (after at least one blank) by a width scale-factor, a height scale-factor and then the corresponding HP font name. The scale-factors scale the size of the Acorn font to that of the HP font. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ File 3 ‘PageList.’ (introduced in version 2.13) This lists up to 12 paper sizes for your printer, one line per size. The file itself also contains this explanation of the format. The distributed list has all the paper sizes allowed for the HP 4P printer. You may want to edit this file to add or subtract entries. Warning: the layouts set up in the ‘Choices’ file expect page sizes to be listed in a fixed order. Additional ones should be added at the end of the list. Check that all the stored layouts in the ‘Choices’ file have the correct page size with your edited file ‘PageList’. Each line contains the name of the paper size and its description for the printer. It begins with exactly 12 characters for the name of the paper size (shown in the menu), followed by the fields describing the format separated from each other by 1 or more blanks. The fields are: the PCL code, (defined in Table D1 of the LaserJet Users Manual) width & height of the paper in mm the unprintable margin size for portrait orientation left & right in mm. the unprintable margin size for landscape orientation left & right in mm. There must be a blank line at the end. Here is the supplied ‘PageList’: Page Name Code Width Height Unprintable margins A4 26 210.0 296.9 4.2 4.2 8.1 6.5 Letter 2 215.9 279.4 4.2 4.2 8.4 6.6 Legal 3 215.9 355.6 4.2 4.2 8.4 6.6 Executive 1 184.1 266.7 4.2 4.2 8.4 6.6 Monarch 80 98.4 190.5 4.2 4.2 8.4 6.6 Com-10 81 104.7 241.3 4.2 4.2 8.4 6.6 Int. C5 91 162.0 228.9 4.2 4.2 8.1 6.5 Int. B5 100 175.9 249.9 4.2 4.2 8.1 6.5 Int. DL 90 110.0 220.0 4.2 4.2 8.1 6.5 Here are three bigger page formats you may want: (defined in PCL but not useful for LaserJet 4P) Ledger 6 279.4 431.8 4.2 4.2 8.4 6.6 A3 27 296.9 419.9 4.2 4.2 8.1 6.5 Custom 101 215.9 355.6 4.2 4.2 8.4 6.6 __________________________________________________________________________ Utilities There are three utilities within the !LazyPrint application itself ‘LPPrint’, ‘CSV2Labels’, and ‘Thickline’ and another application !LazyCodes. LPPrint This utility sends a ‘Printout’ file (file type FF4, made by !LazyPrint) to the printer. Make sure that the !Lazyprint application has been seen by the filer, then double click on the ‘Printout’ file to print it. Note: this is the only utility provided as shareware. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Converting a CSV file to labels for printing with ‘CSV2Labels’ To print labels requires the text file to be in exactly the correct format with a fixed number of lines per label and a maximum width to avoid printing over label gaps. The program ‘CSV2Labels’ takes a file with, for example, names and addresses, where each part of the entry is separated by commas and the entries are separated with a newline. The entries may be enclosed in quotes thus allowing commas inside them. This is ‘Comma Separated Variables’ format, which can be exported from most database programs. Here are a few example lines: "A.N.Other","","123 4th Street","","Anytown","County, CT99 A12" "E.T.Cetera","Nonentity","High Street","Village","Town","County, XY7 X89" In these two examples the parts of the entries were set up expecting a name and 5 parts to the address. All 6 parts need not be used; some are left blank (either as two adjacent commas or a pair of quotes with nothing in between). These blank fields are ignored, they are not printed as a blank line, which would look strange in the middle of an address. To run the program, simply double-click on your CSV file (which must be of type DFE). Two little windows appear; in the top one enter the number of lines per label and the maximum number of characters per line. The second is a standard ‘Save as:’ window for saving the output text file. If you want to print this same set of labels frequently it may be worth saving them to a file instead of sending them directly to the printer. Print this text file using !LazyPrint in the usual way with a suitable layout. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ThickLine When you print Draw Files containing thin white lines on a dark background on a high resolution printer, you may find that the thinnest lines are lost due to spreading of the ink or toner. ‘ThickLine’ allows you to increase the thickness of the thinner lines in a Draw file. It is not a Desktop program; it is written in BASIC, and can be run however you prefer. I usually set up a Task Window, by clicking menu over the rightmost icon on the icon bar, then typing ‘Thickline’ followed by, for example: * dir $.Utils to get into the Utils directory where my Draw file is found. Then enter the name, for example ‘Thinboxes’. There is a short pause while the program looks at the file, then it tells you the line width of the two thinnest lines in Draw units and asks you what width you want for the thinnest, and the filename for output. Print the output file with !Lazyprint in the usual way. 1 Draw unit =1/(180x256) inches or 1/640 of a printer’s point. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Application !LazyCodes (supplied with version numbers above 2.37) First either copy the !LazyCodes application to a filer window in a directory of your hard disk, or double click on it to open a small window containing a list of the !Lazyprint control codes used in printing text files, (described earlier in the earlier section Control codes in text ) Each line of the list in the window has 3 entries: - an icon containing the value of the code - the keys to use to enter that code from the keyboard - a description of the action of the code. The window is used in a similar way to the !Chars application usually provided by the RISC OS system in Apps. When editing text using !Edit, or a similar editor, place the cursor at the position where you want the control code to be entered, then move the cursor into the !LazyCodes window and click on the icon of the desired code, which will be copied to the open window of the file you are editing. To quit !LazyCodes use the ‘Close’ icon on the window. __________________________________________________________________________ Comments 1.Conflict with Turbo Drivers To use !LazyPrint with the Computer Concepts Turbo driver cable, first double-click on your: !System.!CCShared.!PrintQFS to neutralize the effect of the cable before attempting to print anything. 2.Conflict with Printer Drivers Although !LazyPrint will happily sit on the icon bar as well as other printer applications such as !Printers, you should not try to print using !Lazyprint while the other application is busy sending a file to the printer. 3. HP printer/plotter Models tested !LazyPrint has only been well tested on a Hewlett Packard LaserJet 4P, it should work on any model 4 type HP printer though the ‘Fontlist’ file will have to be changed for a 4PJ or 4L model which do not support all the fonts. Users have reported it works well on HP4L, HP5L, HP540, HP560C, HP1600C. 2. Acorn RISC OS versions tested Mostly RISCOS 3.1x to 3.7 (StrongARM). Probably will work with RISC OS 2, but not tested. __________________________________________________________________________ Reporting Faults I have yet to write a program which is completely perfect and bug free. If you find a problem, please complete the information in the file ‘FaultRep’ and send it to me either via e-mail or on a disk with the file you were trying to print. If you want a reply you must be a registered user (Read ReadMe). Please contact me if you want more facilities in !LazyPrint; the current application mostly contains the features I needed, there may be others you want which are not hard to provide but I just did not happen to think of them. __________________________________________________________________________ Address for Correspondence D.J.Crennell, ‘Fortran Friends’, P.O.Box 64, Didcot, Oxon OX11 0TH. E-mail: CRENNELL@V2.RL.AC.UK To register, please send a cheque for £10 sterling, payable to ‘D.J.Crennell’, to the address above __________________________________________________________________________