JCSM Shareware Collection 1993 November

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Text File | 1992-11-11 | 19.0 KB | 487 lines

PRIN Version 3.1 Copyright (C) Drake Koefoed 1992 Major changes: Version 3.1 new things are the Z option for respect the original pagination, named z because it's probably the last thing you want to do. And the U option for an upper margin at top of each page. New features truncate and box aliasing. The case sensitive commands are gone. You may now type prin commands in caps if you can stand them. Prin now keeps track of lines and pages printed, and the start and finish time of the print job. Every print job is a printer speed test. Not a prin speed test; on a 16 mhz sx it will do over 100 lines a second printing to a ram disk. By use of this program, you agree to hold the author free from any liability of any kind. See legal junk at the end. CONTENTS ======== How to use prin Command line options Altering defaults Beta testing Registration Laurels and Legalese HOW TO USE PRIN =============== PRIN is called up by the command PRIN filename [options] where (filename) is the name of a file. If no filename or options are specified, you get a help screen. Otherwise, PRIN will print the contents of the file named, at 60 lines per page (unless you specify another page size with the /l parameter, explained below). Unless you use the /n parameter (explained below), PRIN will print the filename in all caps at the top of the first page. You may abort what's printing at any time by pressing escape. PRIN will discontinue printing the file, but bear in mind that there are two factors to consider: * Your printer may have a substantial buffer, which is usually full because PRIN runs much faster than a printer. The printer will continue to print what's in that buffer, even after PRIN has been aborted, though PRIN will return to the DOS prompt. * PRIN checks for an escape before sending each line; DOS suspends PRIN while the printer empties enough of its buffer to accept another line; only when PRIN has control back will it abort the printing. While we're speaking of aborts, it helps to turn the printer on before you start printing, but you don't have to. If it's off, you will get the nasty message from DOS: "Error writing device PRN. Abort, Retry, Fail, Ignore?". Just turn the printer on and hit r. It will print as if nothing had happened. I do this a lot because I turn my printers off when something goes wrong, and when you're testing a printing program, that is not uncommon. In answer to the obvious(?) question, no, I can't test if PRN is on. I could test to see if LPT 1 was on, but you can use the MODE command to redirect PRN to another port, in which I would be testing the wrong device. If this doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry, you don't need to know it. PRIN replaces form-feeds embedded in the file with linefeeds, so it ignores the existing pagination of the file. This is handy when printing out shareware documents that have weird page lengths, useless formfeeds, or no pagination at all. PRIN sends an Escape-@ to the printer on startup, (unless you use the i option, explained below), which is a RESET to an Epson and many others. Some printers, however, may not understand this code, in which case they will not reset. PRIN depends on you to set the paper to the TOP OF FORM before starting. 60 (or whatever is set by the /l parameter) lines will be printed, and then a formfeed. When the end of file is reached, another formfeed will be sent to eject the last page, and PRIN will exit. On dot matrix printers, you can roll the paper up a bit and reduce the lines per page with /L to create top margins on all pages. COMMAND LINE OPTIONS ==================== Spaces or forward slashes will have the same effect. Programmers refer to these things as delimiters, because they mark the limits of the filename and the command line parameters. If you use some that are not needed, prin will ignore them. NO FILENAME AT TOP OF FIRST PAGE: /N ----------------------------------- The N option prevents the filename from being printed. You can say PRIN myfile/N or PRIN myfile n Either will stop the filename from being printed. OMIT DATE AND TIME FROM FILENAME: O ----------------------------------- The O option prevents the date and time of the file from being printed. If the filename is not printed, then the date and time are automatically left off. LINES PER PAGE: L ----------------- The L option sets the number of lines to the number following. For example: PRIN filename l55 would cause PRIN to print out the file called filename at 55 lines per page. This number must be two digits. ( use 05 for 5 lines per page.) PAGE NUMBERING: P ----------------- The P option numbers the pages in the upper right. MARGIN AT LEFT: M ----------------- The M option adds a left margin of five characters unless the line is too long. I add a margin to any line that will fit on the page with one. If it won't I print that line without a margin. Using the default linelength, you will get margins if your lines are not over 75 characters. This feature keeps your printout away from the area that hole punches punch in. If you need a margin but have lines longer than 75 chars, what you can do is prin to a file on your ramdisk, using the m function and a line length of 90 or whatever, then prin the ramdisk file with the t option, and chop off whatever is necessary. This is tricky, but will give you a good example of how to use prin. Examples and reasons follow. prin filename f m r90 l00 i -filename is the file you are printing. -f means print to file. We do this in two stages. -r90 means right margin 90 so the left margin can be added even though the lines are already 80 chars long. -l00 tells prin not to put in formfeeds. You want this because when you actually print, prin will substitute linefeeds for the formfeeds, and you do not want the blank lines. -i is initialization off. We will let prin initialize the printer when we print to the printer. No need for an escape @ in the file we are making. Now that we have our output file, which I will assume you named outfile, we go to the business of printing to the printer: prin outfile n t -n for no filename on printout because the first time through we got the file name, and this time the file name is just the temporary file name of the file on the ramdrive, and it is not anything we want on the real printout. -t tells prin to truncate long lines. The default 80 will be used for line length unless you use an rxx or rxxx command for something else. You should now have a printout with a left margin all the way down, and the lines that are too long cut off where they had to be. Needless to say if you do this sort of thing all the time you will want to do it with a batch file that might read something like this if D: is your ram disc: echo d:\temp |prin %1 f m r90 l00 i prin d:\temp n t del d:\temp This will run prin twice so fast you will probably wonder what in the world it is doing. Note that the name temp must not exist or prin will get all huffy about being asked to use an existing file name. This is provided in advanced.zip as the file mprin.bat RIGHT MARGIN: Rxx or Rxxx ------------------------- (where xx or xxx is a number between 10 and 244.) R is the maximum line length. The default is 80. the R parameter sets the point at which PRIN will wrap. I wrap at the last space before that. I back up half the line length looking for a space before I give up and call a procedure called "dumbwrap" that cuts the "word" at the edge of the print area. Since "antidisestablishmentarianism" is well under 40 characters, you will probably not see "dumbwrap" at work unless you try to print out some graphics boxes and use too narrow a margin. The default wrap point is the last space before 80 characters. This option is not a substitute for a word processor. It wraps those lines that do not fit, but starts the next line at the beginning. It is intended primarily to protect the occasional long line in program source code from being chopped off on printing, or printing off the edge of the paper. INITIALIZATION OFF: I --------------------- You may want to use a batch file that sends a file to the printer with copy or some program to set your printer to near letter quality or whatever. If you do, this option prevents PRIN from sending the reset and wiping out what is in the printer's memory. This means PRIN will use whatever font, top of form, etc. the printer is currently set to. Not all printers use escape @ and those that do do not all clear the same things. Standards? We don't need no stinking standards! DOUBLESPACE: D -------------- Prints blank lines between the lines in the original file. Handy for creating a scratch copy of a file without changing the file itself, especially if you're writing the file with an editor that does not do doublespace. PRINT TO FILE: F ---------------- Prints the output to a file. This file may be printed later with the copy command. This lets you use prin to generate such things as shareware doc files on discs with embedded formfeeds and page numbers. Normally you would not use prin to print this output file, because prin would just filter the formfeeds back out again. Prin outputs a line at a time, which is reasonable for a printer, but not very efficient for writing to files. Large documents are best handled by writing to a ram disc and then copying. To fully appreciate the speed of prin, you need to do a print to disc of a large document onto a ramdrive. On a fast machine, you simply will not be able to see the last two digits of lines printed. SET TABSIZE: B -------------- Sets the tabsize to a single nonzero digit, 1 to 9. for example: PRIN filename B5 would cause prin to space over to the next column that is a multiple of 5 each time a tab is encountered. Default is 8, which is the same as DOS print uses. ALTERING DEFAULT SETTINGS: -------------------------- CLONE: C -------- Clones the program to the current settings. The file to be cloned must be named prin.com, and it must be in the current directory. Once cloned, the program may be named anything you wish provided you keep the extension .com. This may be useful for creating one copy that prints doublespace, one that prints with no filename, etc, so you can avoid typing any parameters at all. KLONE: K -------- Klones the program to the defaults. the file to be cloned must be named prin.com, and must be in the current directory. You must give a filename, but if you do not want to print something with the current settings, the file you name should be nonexistent. Klone will take effect, and then prin will try to open the nonexistent file to print out, and exit with the file not found error message. Klone affects the file on disc, not what is in memory. EXAMPLE: -------- prin nonesuch K This would Klone the program to the defaults, and then look for nonesuch to be printed with the existing settings. Since nonesuch does not exist, nothing will be printed with the settings in memory (the old ones), and prin will exit, having changed the program on disc to the default settings. The next time PRIN is called, the default settings will be in effect. TRUNCATE: T ----------- Programmers often want to print out list files that have more than 80 characters per line. My assembler will make them wrap, and so can prin, but that is not really what I want. The stuff that is off the end is just the tail ends of comments. It's confusing to have them wrapped to come up in the code field. T chops off everything beyond the user specified right edge. BOX ALIASING: A --------------- ---------, The A option allows you to have prin substitute : ascii characters for the ,----:-------------------, box characters. : : Stop : : : box : : : messes : : : : : '-------------------' : : Since this option is needed worst by users with daisey : wheel printers, I chose :',- as the alias characters. : '--------------------------------------, : : '------ This gives best chance of being able to print. The | does look a bit more like a vertical line, but not much, and I think it is considerably less common. And we need to put a stop to these: ZDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD? 3 3 3 3 3 3 @DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDY TOP MARGIN: U ------------- Specify a top margin to go on each page below the page numbers and filename, and above the text. Must be single digit, so 9 is as big as you can go without playing tricks with print to file and so on. 6 lines is normally an inch. Most printers have a reasonable top margin of their own, but that is not true of a printer owned by one of my registered users, Richard Conrad. He sent me some printouts. The margins were very near the top. They did not look good. It was intolerable. It's fixed. Usage is /ux where x is the number of blank lines. RESPECT ORIGINAL PAGINATION: Z ------------------------------ You may have something you think is going to print out all right. What you want is for prin to sit quietly by and let the file break pages as it wants unless a page goes over the maximum length you allow. This will keep the printer off the perforations, but of course it will allow one line pages, one of the main curses prin was written to stop. However, you may want to add top margins to something that is paginated right, or add page numbering, or something I never even thought of. The Z option goes to the next page whenever it gets a formfeed out of the file. But prin still provides the services you have come to expect. Possibly good for things like printing list files you want to truncate to 80 chars, or something real tricky you've thought up. EXAMPLES: ========= prin PRIN30.doc This would print PRIN30.DOC at 60 lines per page, with the filename at the top of the first page. prin PRIN30.doc l58 n m p This will print PRIN30.DOC at 58 lines per page *without* the filename at the top, add a margin of five spaces at the left, and number the pages. prin bigfile.txt z f u3 a t r75 L62 This will print BIGFILE.TXT in its original pages unless they go over the 62 lines per page the user has specified. Output will be to a file the user will be asked for a name for, box characters will be converted to ascii, and the long lines will be truncated to the right margin of 75 the user has specified. PRIN is written in ASSEMBLER, so it is very small and fast. I have run {COMMO} in one window of Desqview and PRIN in another with no noticeable slowing of print speed on an 8 mhz XT. I have been shamelessly eating up memory, and have enlarged my buffer so prin is now 16k in memory. Probably you will need to allow 17k to run it from a .bat file under Desqview. You will find PRIN works much better than the DOS print in this situation, because it uses much less CPU time.Also, PRIN is NOT memory resident. ERROR CODES =========== On errors, I save the DOS error code and return it on termination, so you can find out what went wrong if you want. On successful termination, I return an errcode of zero. My own errcode is 96. (60h). Have fun, batch freaks! REGISTRATION: ============= Now here is my favorite part: If you use prin, and it works for you, the right thing to do is to pay for it. Please send $6 to the address below. The I will send you a password and instructions for converting PRIN to the registered version. Registered users can call and get help on assembler, including having an escape code file made for them. All you need to do is log on and say, "hey, remember me? Well, I just gotta have this escape code, and I can't figure out how to do it." SITE LICENSES ------------- I have been asked by one user for a site license price. I considered the possibilities of a pricing schedule. If I charged by machines using the program, it could be put on a file server and one copy could print thousands of pages a day. If I charged by the copy, users who had one printer and a large number of computers might pay a lot though they do little printing. In the end I decided I could think of no formula that would really be fair, and so I told this user what I am now telling you. The price of a site license for prin is to be set by the user in good faith, as that amount which, all things considered, is a fair price. The license is not limited as to the number of copies that can be run. It is only the honest few who register at all, and in the end, I think they can be trusted to be fair. THOSE DAMN BLINKING DOTS ------------------------ They probably bother me more than they do you. But more a than year after the original release of prin, I have less registrations than phone bills from uploading it. It's being used all over the world, but people are just not getting around to sending checks. It may well be more a case of procrastination than dishonesty. I tried to do something that would keep registration on your mind without being a pain. The ascii 250 I used is the _smallest_ character in the set. It's half the size of a period on my (mono) monitor. PRICING: -------- Prin is priced considerably lower than most comparable programs, if there are such things. This reflects a view of shareware that it should be less expensive than commercial software even when it's better. If users enthusiastically upload it, and encourage others to register, I think I will eventually be paid reasonably for the work I have done. Drake Koefoed 1409 Oakpatch road # A 9 Eugene Oregon 97402 LAURELS AND LEGALESE ==================== Desqview is the property of Quarterdeck. It's a great program. {Commo} is the property of Fred Brucker. It's a greater program. The latest version of {Commo} is always available on assembler, and first time callers are able to download. BY USING THIS PROGRAM YOU AGREE TO HOLD THE AUTHOR FREE OF ALL LIABILITY OF ANY KIND TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW. YOU ASSUME THE RISK OF ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS. THIS PROGRAM IS SOLD WITHOUT WARRENTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND MERCHANTABILITY. REMEDIES ARE LIMITED TO THE REFUND OF THE REGISTRATION FEE.