john13@garfield.UUCP (11/01/87)
-- Probably the easiest way to get decent b/w graphics output from DPaint I/II or any program that gives you problems is to write your own program to do it. Note that such a program doesn't need to violate any system guidelines except to ignore the prt: device and send output straight to par: or ser:. As such, it isn't subject to breaking by future revisions to the OS. My black'n'white printouts from DPaint II look great... a perfect 1:1 aspect ratio, or quadruple density, or double speed for just a quick look. Overstrike really improves the quality of final printouts (in the documentation to the printer driver generator, it mentions that overstrike capability can be added but makes the driver a memory hog. I can't see why that should be so!). If there's a lot of text the second strike can be 1/216" lower than the first to smooth out many of the jaggies. All of this is with a Panasonic printer, but it would be a lot quicker to change 5 lines in the program for a different printer than it would be to twiddle the margin/scaling values to get a 1:1 printout. I know this firsthand from spending several hours printing grids trying to get all of the lines printed with identical height/width/spacing. I managed to get to the point where there were only 6 or 7 lines that were doubled or left out on a page... that isn't good enough! [ I won't be posting my program, but will e-mail source and/or binary to anyone who requests it. As a historical note, it was originally written in 6502 assembler on the C64; I only had to leave out a few features when I re-wrote it in C :-). ] John -- "I would have promised those terrorists a TRIP TO DISNEYLAND if it would have gotten those hostages released. I thank God they were satisfied with the missiles and we didn't have to go to that extreme." -- preliminary draft of Ollie's testimony