radford@calgary.UUCP (Radford Neal) (03/18/87)
I posted an item a few days ago claiming that Microsoft Word 3.0 does
not allow quality printing on the Imagewriter. As someone pointed out to
me, this is WRONG. It does. Apologies to any confused users out there...
No apologies to Microsoft, however. Here's how I managed to make this
mistake.
1) I own a TI855 printer, not an Imagewriter. I wrote a driver
for it, using the Imagewriter dialog routines to save work.
It works fine with Word 1.05 and other programs.
2) I tried using this printer with Word 3.0 and it works except that
no quality print option is displayed in the Print dialog box. Since
the dialog routines are identical to the Imagewriter driver, I
expected quality print to be unavailable there too.
3) I'm pretty sure that I then tried the Imagewriter driver. This
does in fact have the quality selection buttons, but they aren't
at the top of the dialog box, as is standard, but down at the
bottom. I didn't notice them.
Microsoft has rather gratuitously changed the layout of the print dialog
box (and page setup). This is a Bad Thing. Quite contrary to all user
interface guidelines. While they were about it, they apparently decided that
nobody uses any printers other than Imagewriters and Laserwriters, so they
needn't adapt very gracefully to that environment. Of course, they wouldn't
have had to adapt at all if they'd kept the dialog boxes standard to begin
with.
Radford Neal