macdonald@author.dec.com (QRZ DE WA1OMM -- DTN 223-3439) (12/22/86)
PageSetter by Gold Disk is a nice little program for creating pseudo-
typeset looking output from Amiga screen to printer. It is WYSIWYG and
easy to use. I am having a problem though when I try to run it from
Workbench V1.2 (it comes with Wb V1.1).
Here's the problem:
When I boot Pagesetter as the Wb diskette and run it - no problem. Output
goes to my Epson RX80 and looks as good as you can expect the output of
a 9 pin dot-matrix printer to look.
However, when I boot Pagesetter off my V1.2 Workbench and attempt to
print the same file, I get a narrow blank line across the output
roughly every 10 lines. It only seems to happen from V1.2 Workbench.
It appears to coincide with the length of the printer buffer to. The
note on page 8 of the V1.2 Release Notes about Epson and other dot matrix
printers does not work - it only makes the blank line much more severe and
distorts a lot of the text.
Has anyone tried Pagesetter on V1.2? Do you have a similar problem? Is there
a fix to allow running it on V1.2?
Thanks.
Paul
john13@garfield.UUCP (12/24/86)
In article <7085@decwrl.DEC.COM> macdonald@author.dec.com (QRZ DE WA1OMM -- DTN 223-3439) writes: > However, when I boot Pagesetter off my V1.2 Workbench and attempt to > print the same file, I get a narrow blank line across the output > roughly every 10 lines. It only seems to happen from V1.2 Workbench. I've only done sample output from the supplied Workbench - to a Panasonic KX-P1091 using the supplied Epson driver. The only funny thing that happens is that every so many lines it causes the printer to do a reset, which can lead to following lines to be shifted 1 pixel over, not very difficult to work around I'm sure. Now I haven't been on in over a week, and I have 70 more articles left to go to catch up (gone through 200 already); if I don't see a review of PageSetter by then, beware! I may be FORCED to POST one :-) ! Capsule summary: Excellent WYSIWYG and user interface. Standard screen-oriented fonts look terrible printed, others like Zuma fonts look fantastic (I'm trying to track down these Fish fonts and others to try). Best typewriter-style text so far from Ruby 12 edited to get rid of all those 2-pixel wide vertical lines. Suggestions for improvements to print quality will follow, hopefully they will get to Gold Disk somehow (someone in Toronto want to relay?). Using this edited Ruby 12, print quality is pretty good for dot-matrix. Laser-printed output remains to be seen. Graphic output, and ease of mixing text and graphics, is good; clipping factors of 1:1 and 5:4 are selectable for *each* graphic area. BTW, what exactly does the "kerning" selection in Font-Ed do? How does this relate to presentation on the screen and/or printer? John
jerem@tekgvs.UUCP (Jere Marrs) (12/26/86)
> >BTW, what exactly does the "kerning" selection in Font-Ed do? How does this >relate to presentation on the screen and/or printer? > >John I only recently learned this, so I have all of the arrogance of recent learning. The terms "kerning" and "proportional spacing" are often confused. Proportional spacing means that letters of narrower width are given proportionately smaller spacing and therefore fill space more efficiently and more aesthetically. An "i" takes fewer 'microspaces' than an "m." This is how typesetting differs from a normal typewriter. Back in the old days when type- setters used to cast their own Woods-Metal fonts for each publication, they found that when certain letters occurs in particular sequence, even more space can be used efficiently. For instance, if a 'V' occurs after an 'A', then they can be pushed closer together. So AV takes less space than it would if each letter were given the full number of microspaces attributed to it proportionally. If you imagine each letter in a rectangle whose width is equal to its number of microspaces, then kerning allows these rectangles to overlap. So, clearly, kerning requires that the actual sequence of the letters be taken in account in spacing. Proportional spacing considers only the next letter to be printed. I assume FontEd considers the sequence of letters and allows them to 'fit' together more closely. A computer and a laser printer (or other bit- mapping printers) are ideally suited for this. I thought that the person who observed that desk-top publishing (let's find another term) will require new things of editors and word processors, hit upon a fundamental truth. We will need programs that deal with text-formatting 'objects' rather than print pitch, margins, indentation, etc.. Such an object could be a paragraph, a header, an indented section, or graphics, etc.. We would then create a base of these objects and then assign them to spaces in the document, letting the formatting program worry about the details including the proportional spacing and kerning. It would be a more interactive, WYSIWYG troff. The graphic orientation would obviate the 'dot' directives. -Jere ----------------------
wagner@utcs.UUCP (12/26/86)
In article <7085@decwrl.DEC.COM> macdonald@author.dec.com (QRZ DE WA1OMM -- DTN 223-3439) writes: > > PageSetter by Gold Disk > > ...when I boot Pagesetter off my V1.2 Workbench and attempt to > print the same file, I get a narrow blank line across the output > roughly every 10 lines. It only seems to happen from V1.2 Workbench. > > Has anyone tried Pagesetter on V1.2? yup. > Do you have a similar problem? yup. > Is there > a fix to allow running it on V1.2? 1.2 only came out in canada at the same time as Pagesetter. I suspect that Gold Disk is still unaware of the problem. I'll try to call them (wonder if they are working today?). Michael