Collection of Tools & Utilities/Collection of Tools and Utilities.iso/edit/pcwpsfix.zip/READ.ME

Text File | 1992-09-17 | 8KB | 187 lines

                     PC-Write Postscript Fix


DISCLAIMER.

      The materials in this archive are provided as is, without
any warranty of any sort. Use at your own risk. No form of
support will be provided.


CLAIMER.

      These files may be freely used for personal, academic or
other non-commercial purposes. Commercial users must obtain a
license from me for the use of those parts which have been
written by me. Contact me for further information.

                Ian D. Gay
                Department of Chemistry
                Simon Fraser University
                Burnaby, B. C. V5A1S6
                Canada
                email: [e-mail]


EXPLANATION.

      PC-Write is a shareware word processor from Quicksoft. Most
of the time it is a very pleasant word processor, but its support
for Postscript printers leaves something to be desired. As
distributed, there are several bugs which prevent correct
operation on postscript printers, and many features which are
implemented in a way I consider sub-optimal. The present files
fix the bugs I know about, and do a few other things the way I
like them. They have been tested with the recent 'Standard' and
'Advanced' versions of PC-W. They may or may not work with
earlier versions.

      Printer support in PC-W is provided by a file named PR.DEF
which determines what characters are sent to the printer for
spacing, font changes etc. This file is also read by the PC-W
editor to determine the widths of letters in the various fonts.
For Postscript printers, the PR.DEF file causes a series of
commands beginning with the character # to be sent to the
printer. A postscript program, called PSDOWN.INI is provided
which interprets these commands, and produces appropriate printer
actions.

      The printer setup program from PC-W allows you to pick one
of several PR.DEF files, depending on which Postscript fonts you
wish to use. It also allows you to select 'standalone' or
'networked' mode. What this means is that in the former case, the
PSDOWN program is made permanently resident in the printer. This
causes subsequent printing to be faster, but may wreak havoc with
non-PCW use of the printer. In 'networked' mode, the PSDOWN
program is prepended to each print file, and is not made
resident. This is better, if you use the printer for anything
else, but slower, especially for small jobs.

      The present archive contains replacements for PR.DEF and
PSDOWN.INI, in files named PS.DEF and IDG.INI. These provide
Times, Helvetica and Symbol font families, in 'networked' mode
only. The files can easily be edited to provide other font
families, if desired.


INSTALLATION.

      To use these files, copy them to your PC-Write directory.
The file PS.DEF must be renamed to PR.DEF in order to use it. If
you want to preserve your original PR.DEF file, re-name it to
something else first. The IDG.INI file should not be re-named.

      The enclosed IDG.INI file is quite a bit bigger than PC-W's
PSDOWN.INI. This is because I have included a lot of comments,
and provided indentation to make program operation clearer. If
you print a lot over a slow link, you may not like this. You can
make a stripped-down version, which is a bit smaller than PC-W's,
by (CAREFULLY) removing all blanks at the start of lines, and all
comments (everything from a % character to the end of the line).



BUGS FIXED.

1. Underlines: PCW's underlines have a position and thickness
      that is determined by line spacing rather than type size.
      If you change line spacing in the middle of a page, the
      effect on underlines popagates back to the beginning of the
      page (Yecch!). Micro-space inserted for justification does
      not underline, leaving ugly gaps.
      These bugs are fixed. The same bugs exist in PCW's double
      underline and crossout. These are not supported by the
      present files (the limited number of font letters can be
      put to better use) and the bugs are not fixed.

2. Columns: The multiple-column support provided in the
      'Advanced' version just doesn't work on postscript
      printers. This is now fixed.

3. Margins: You don't get the margin size you expect in landscape
      orientation. This is fixed.

4. IBM Graphic characters: The sizes of these did not scale
      correctly. This is fixed.

5. Scaling fixed width fonts: Changing size for Courier font did
      not always work right. Fixed, I think.



THINGS DONE MY WAY.

1. Super/sub scripts: PC-W treats these as 'effects', meaning that
      they are assumed to have the same width as normal characters.
      Since they are really smaller, this messes up alignment and
      justification. These files support them as 'typefaces', so
      the problem does not occur... up to a point. The H and L
      fonts are defined to be Times width super/sub scripts. These
      will also provide super/sub scripts for other fonts, but the
      widths will then be a little off. They will also be a little
      off if you try bold or italic super/sub scripts. What PC-W
      needs, but doesn't have, is a feature which says 'the next
      characters are just like the current font, but a factor of x
      narrower'.

2. Bold Italics: PC-W doesn't support these. Present files do,
      for Times only, using the O font.

3. Symbol font: This is available as font S, including the high
      characters which map as you would expect, e.g. character
      182 gets you a partial derivative.

4. IBM Graphic Characters: These have been re-designed with
      thicker lines and wider spaces. Looks a bit better, in my
      opinion.

5. Quotes: Postscript printers provide left and right single and
      double quotes, which are different from each other, as well
      as single and double primes. PC-W gives a right single
      quote for ASCII character 39, and left for character 96
      (accent). The present support does the same, but also gives
      you an option to select primes, see below. PC-W always
      gives you double primes for ASCII character 34 (double
      quote). These files give you alternating left and right
      double quotes for successive occurrences of character 34,
      with an option to have double primes instead. There is no
      way to get consecutive left or right double quotes - I
      couldn't think of a reason to want them. Sorry if you can;
      at least you can have primes and be just like the PC-W
      distribution.

6. Line spacings: A wider variety is provided, selectable in
      points, e.g. you can now have 12 point type on 13 point
      spacing, if you like it, which I do.

7. Ghostscript: A postscript file produced by the PC-W
      distribution bombs on the 640k versions of Ghostscript, by
      running out of virtual memory. (I haven't tested the recent
      '386 extended memory versions of GS. Presumably these will
      work, if enough memory is available). A large part of the
      problem is that PC-W distribution re-encodes all possible
      fonts at startup time. I have re-written the font-handling
      stuff to only re-encode fonts that will be used. This has
      the effect that documents that don't use too many fonts can
      now be viewed by all versions of Ghostscript.

8. Postscript commands. PC-W defines the symbol string
      #G COMMAND. as causing the execution of the postscript
      procedure whose name is COMMAND. This is used with a .TT
      line to insert the control string into the output file.
      Thus
      (AltG).TT"#G landscape."  (note the space and period)
      will put the printer into landscape mode, and
      (ALtG).TT"#G portrait." will return to portrait

      IDG.INI defines 4 new procedures to handle quotes and
      primes. p2 causes character 34 to produce double primes,
      instead of matched double quotes, q2 switches back to
      quotes. e.g.
      (AltG).TT"#G p2."