jlfox@unix.cis.pitt.edu (James L. Fox) (03/12/91)
A friend has a Comrex printer ( Com Riter ][ ) attached to his Apple ][e.
The store he bought it from created a custom program disk for him which
caused the "Comrex" printer to appear in his list of printers to choose
from. Recently he inadvertently inserted the original Appleworks diskette
in the middle of a session. When he finished the session, his custom disk
would no longer list his Comrex printer as an option. The store is out
of business!
I know next to 0 about Appleworks but I presume there was(is?) a table
entry and possibly a custom driver on his program disk. I noted that both
his "startup" and "program" disks are named APPLEWORKS. There is a file
(I forget its entire name) on his custom disk and the original Appleworks
program disk with a name ending in ===.pr . The creation date (of this file)
on his custom disk is later than the original and he says the later date is
near the date he bought the printer. This leads me to believe he should be
seeing the Comrex as an option, but he's not.
Does anyone know what happened here?
Thanks,
jlfox@unix.cis.pitt.edu
The ][e owner is Joe Luxbacher in Pitt's athletic dept at (412)648-8217.bill@braille.uwo.ca (W.B. Carss) (03/12/91)
If you have some kind of file handling program like System Utilities or Copy II plus or something like that, look at the custom disk for a file called SEG.PR which is the file in which the printer information for AppleWorks is stored. If the file on the custom disk is damaged then you will have to look in the owner's manual for the printer to determine the control characters for it. It isn't as difficult as you might think - look up boldface on and off, underline on and off, proportional spacing (if you want) and the like. There is a menu-diriven option in appleworks for adding a custom printer to the list. All you need to do is add a new printer to the list of the name of your choice and enter the control codes as needed. The other are of concern here is the interface between your friend's apple and the printer. Depending on what type it is, you may have to insert control codes for it. For example, I have a Grppler+ buffered parallel interface card that requires a different control code than a super serial card for example. The manual that came with the interface card will be able to tell you about that. Make a copy of the appleworks disk before you start fooling around with it, and then copy the seg.pr from the custom disk onto the copy of appleworks just to see if the printer is still there, beforetaking the time to look through the manuals. Let me know what happens. -- Bill Carss bill@braille.uwo.ca