grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Graham Thomas) (06/20/89)
Well, Atari UK finally released the Epson FX-80 emulator for the Atari laser printer, the one that some other European countries have been selling for months. As usual, Atari made a bit of a mess of it. First, the good news. The emulator itself seems to be basically OK, though not perfect. Using it with First Word Plus, we've found it occasionally loses its way and forgets to print a chunk, or prints the same paragraph several times over. Reprinting usually solves the problem, and I'm not sure what exactly causes the glitches. .IMG graphics in Wordplus documents now print out very nicely, and at the correct size as indicated on screen. Screendumps are also nice, in any one of five sizes from postage stamp to A4 (provided you have the RAM for the latter - you may need up to 1 meg for the buffer!) The set of fonts which Atari have included lets you print text in pica, elite and (non-standard, 5cpi) expanded formats, in the most popular styles (bold, underlined, italics), and with proper sub- and superscripts (except for expanded). The bad news is: no condensed print (font not supplied), no 1.5-line spacing (fontheight governs linefeed, so until someone produces a set of 1.5-line high fonts...), not all combinations of styles in all typesizes. The emulator can handle several different font formats, including GDOS fonts, so improvements are a matter of putting together better font libraries (again, you need lots of RAM) or waiting for kind souls to submit their collections to the PD libraries. One important tip for users of First Word Plus: use the INSTALL.PRG from your version to reinstall the PRINTER.HEX file supplied with the emulator. The PRINTER.CFG file supplied by Atari is likely to be for a different version from the one you have. (My suspicion is that it's the one for the German version current in November 1988 - the PRINTER.HEX file has a lovely German explanatory preamble, which shows how much customising Atari UK did!) Finding this out lost us an afternoon. The documentation with the emulator is a 60-page booklet which, although at times a little cryptic, is adequate. It's therefore a huge improvement on the non-documentation that was sent out with the Diablo emulator. We haven't tried printing from a self-written C, Pascal, Basic or whatever program yet, but the docs appear to provide enough information on the necessary control codes, including the extra ones that make the laser printer do a few things a real dot matrix printer can't. Verdict: OK so far, but let down by sloppy presentation on the part of Atari UK. The people from the German firm DMC, who wrote it, seem to have done a pretty good job. Now we need a better set of fonts. Cost is 29.95 UK pounds. ps. I keep asking about Ultrascript, but Atari UK won't say when that might see the light of day in the UK. They really aren't committed to getting the ST into business and educational markets, whatever they say in their press releases. Shame. -- Graham Thomas, SPRU, Mantell Building, U of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RF, UK JANET: grahamt@uk.ac.sussex.syma EARN/BITNET: grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk ARPA: grahamt%syma.sussex.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk UUCP: grahamt@syma.uucp Phone: +44 273 686758