pta@santra.UUCP (Pertti Tapola) (04/16/87)
I have bought Epstart (from Softstyle) and SuperPaint (from Silicon Beach Software) but it seems that they do not work together. SuperPaint is great by itself and Epstart is mostly usable. I have tried MS Word (1.05), MacPaint and MacDraw with Epstart and they work fine (also does Command-Shift-4 and Finder). However, when I am printing anything from SuperPaint, only garbage arrives to Epson MX-80. Has anybody else had problems with the programs mentioned? One thing that might complicate things a little bit is that I have my own serial-to-parallel converter, which is built around a small Motorola 6809 processor board. Basically the converter only buffers characters into 8 K RAM buffer and handles X-ON - X-OFF -protocol. There should, however, be nothing wrong with the interface, because it works when printing from other programs than SuperPaint. Is there something special about SuperPaint? Does it really use the printer driver that is selected, or is it doing its own printing? SuperPaint also bombs (ID=3) when printing with Preview, a "display printer" driver from net. Another problem is that I cannot get any good-looking characters with Epstart in graphic modes (High, Standard). The only font that does not look scaled is Monaco 9 point. Not even the fonts (Elite, Pica, Condensed, Proportional) supplied with the driver look good; they get scaled (that is: some of the vertical lines of the characters are thick and others are thin. No scaling in the other direction is done. I suspect this is because Epson MX-80 has 480 (or 960) pixels per line and ImageWriter has 512 (or more?). I have tried both Tall and Tall Adjusted modes and High and Standard graphics. I have a printout, which has printings with many fonts that look good, but I cannot get that anymore. I have upgraded my Epson MX-80 from type II to type III (a ROM change inside the printer). I suspect that the good-looking printouts were generated when the printer was of type II but I cannot check that any more. (Otherwise, type II did not work with Epstart; line spacing and tabulation were incorrect.) Another possibility is that the margin or other settings in Word were different. I am using MS Word 1.05 and System 3.2 with Finder 5.3. The Mac is 512K with new ROMs. Anybody got any ideas or similar experience? -- UUCP: pta@santra.uucp (...mcvax!santra!pta) Pertti Tapola EARN,BITNET: pta@fingate.bitnet Helsinki University of Technology ARPA: pta%fingate.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu Computing Centre X.400: pta@hut.fi SF-02150 ESPOO, FINLAND