rchampe@hubcap.clemson.edu (Richard Champeaux) (03/09/90)
There is now a PLT: v1.3b. It only fixes one trivial bug, and one bug that might be a major one depending on what size paper you are trying to use. Since it probably only affects a small number of people, and since I'm planning to make a bunch of improvements to PLT: sometime around July, I was planning to email it to people who request it, instead of posting. It didn't seem right to clutter amiga.binaries with such a minor fix, when a more major release will be made around August. But if enough people request it, I will post it. The minor bug fix was pretty trivial. If PLT: couldn't find the font names file, it attempted to open a requestor, but at that point, intuition.library hadn't been opened. The other bug only affects people who are using formfeed paper which is longer than 11 inches. It's kind of embarassing, since I claimed that you could print a B sized page on a wide carriage, when you simply can't with v1.3a. The problem was that the printer driver claims that the page length is zero for printers that use formfeed paper. PLT: needs to know the maximum page size so that it will know when to throw up the requestor saying that your plot won't fit on the page, and to know how much to reduce the plot if you tell it to make it fit. Since the printer driver returned a page length of zero, I needed to come up with a number somehow. I chose 10.5 inches, inorder to give a 1/4 inch border on the 11 inch page. Seemed reasonable at the time, but it ruled out printing anything longer than 10.5 inches. That includes anyone with 12 inch paper or anyone wishing to print a B sized page on a wide carriage printer. Whoops! The solution: I threw in another environment variable for the maximum page length. If PLT: can't find this environment variable, then it assumes 10.5 inches. This is only temporary, and is subject to change in the next release. It only involved adding 10 lines of code, so I just whipped it out when someone reported the bug. One of the things I considering to improve in PLT: is to get rid of all these damn enviroment variables. I'm going to improve the switch line a good bit to allow you to specify things like the printer resolution, the size of the page (aside from the standard sizes), and other such things. I'll leave the support of the prefereces settings, but I wan't you to be able to specify them on the fly when you invoke PLT:. It's kind of awkward to have to have to go into preferences just to change the printer resolution. I'm also considering completely rewriting parts of PLT:. It's been through about 4 generations of violent changes, and is now a real mess. Like I said, I'll email v1.3b to anyone who asks. Unless you anticipate printing anything longer than 11 inches, then you don't really need to go through the bother of getting v1.3b. You might as well wait for v1.4 that I expect to release in August. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rich Champeaux PLT: The plotter device for the Amiga! rchampe@hubcap.clemson.edu Ask for it at your neighborhood FTP site! "It's never too late to do nothing at all." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------