** 2 page Papyrus tutorial / 1770 words ** And so to print.. Michael High continues his tutorials on Papyrus with some tips for getting the best results from the printer... When you select Print Papyrus builds up an image of the page and relies on the printer driver to tell the printer how to print it. To get the best from your printer you need an understanding of how printer drivers are set up. Happily this chore is easier now Papyrus and NVDI have implemented remarkably similar set-up dialogs. However, there is a snag... Manual - what manual? The Papyrus manual boldly declares "most people will not need to use the Printer set-up dialog". While that's true if your printer is explicitly included in the available drivers it still leaves the rest of us following this pearl of wisdom: "...use one it emulates (see your printer's manual for details)". Unfortunately most current printers are supplied without manuals so it's a case of buyer beware! However, all is not lost, there are some general principles which should help you make sense of the four pages of Printer Set-up dialog. Which driver to use? Every time you print you are given a choice between the Papyrus drivers or those provided by NVDI, GDOS or SpeedoGDOS, depending which font handling system you have installed. I have found no significant speed or quality difference between the external and internal drivers so I use the Papyrus drivers because they provide convenient popup menus to set the quality and paper settings. NVDI offers the same settings but you have to open the Control panel to change them. The choice is yours depending on which other applications you use - you can copy the settings between them. Printer families ** UL ** * Daisy-wheel: This technology is strictly text only and not supported by Papyrus. * Postscript: Commonly offered as an option on top end laser printers and used by printers and typesetting bureau. Papyrus can output to these printers via an external NVDI optional extra driver but is not covered in this article. * Pin Printers: This originally consisted of printers with 9 or 24 pins that struck a typewriter ribbon onto paper to produce the image from a pattern of dots. These days they are more often inkjet printers which squirt dots of ink onto paper using a variety of similar technologies. The common characteristic is that the dots are printed a line at a time, as the data is received by the printer. Each line consists of multiple dots and spaces and the number of "pins" determines the resolution. * Page Printers: Laser printers fall into this category. The toner is "baked" onto the paper. Since the paper must keep moving to avoid catching fire, these printers usually wait until all the data for a page has been received into printer memory before starting to print; hence the term page printer. To minimise the amount of printer memory needed data compression is almost always used. If your pages include large detailed or dense halftone images you may run out of printer memory in which case the only solution is to print at a lower resolution or invest in a printer memory upgrade. * Image Printers. These are not physical printers but drivers which can generate an image file for use in another program. These could be anything from 90x90 dpi bitmaps for use in ST-Guide hypertexts up to 2400 dpi ISS files for high quality photo-typesetters. ** /UL ** Where do I start? Although there are no formally agreed standards for printer instruction codes, many differing makes of printer share common instructions with major manufacturers such as Hewlett Packard or Epson. The manufacturers themselves do not rewrite the rules with each model. So if you cannot find an existing driver for your exact model, look for a driver for an earlier model from the same family of printer where a Mk 4 laser printer driver will probably drive the latest Mk 6 - although any new features are unlikely to work. If that fails, look for a driver for the same family of printer from another major manufacturer. This may work if your bargain printer emulates its more expensive brother's code. There are far fewer manufacturers of printer components than there are printer manufacturers, so the odds are better than you'd imagine. Once you find a driver which produces some recognisable output and you have some documentation to decipher the control codes you can then begin to fine-tune the settings as described in the Papyrus manual along with the following pointers. General Dialog The first two fields in the General Dialog define individual drivers: Printer and Quality. These are the only settings you see again in the Print Dialog. Quality is normally used for things like dpi settings. However, it can be used for any special effects. For example, page printer drivers can usually be set to produce multiple copies very rapidly. If you want to edit these Printer and Quality descriptions, make the changes in the fields marked Name: and Quality setting. (In Papyrus 3 it was called Quality Specification:). Once you hit Apply, they appear as popup choices under Printer and Quality. The Output Port is normally set to Parallel. This is where you set up Image Printers by selecting IMG or ISS-Graphic. When an Image printer driver is used, the file selector appears after you hit Print so you can specify and name the image file you are about to create. Fanfold margins are strictly for Pin printers only - leave them at zero for all other printer types. Margins for page printers are set in the Cut Sheet dialog. A word about margins. It is important not to confuse the margins set for the printer driver with those set in the Page Layout dialog. Printer margins are the physical limitations of the printer. Page Layout margins are those you want set within a document. Document margins and the rulers are measured from the edge of the paper. It is critical that the printer margins are set correctly because Papyrus calculates all spacing by subtracting the printer margins from the document margins. All printers have a limit to the width of the output, due to the physical limits of the printing mechanism. Most also have a limit as to how close to the top and bottom of the page they can print due to the need for the transport mechanism to grip the paper. Pin printers may have different top and bottom margins, depending on whether cut sheet or fan fold paper is used. My old pin printer had to have about 20mm of paper fed through before the paper bail would grip a cut sheet. Yet it could print tractor fed paper right from the top to the bottom edges. If your printer margins are not documented, you can usually find them out by printing a self-test page. This is the one thing all printer manufacturers like to tell you about, because it is the printer's way of showing off - even shop assistants know how to print a test page! After printing a test page you can measure how close to the edge of the paper it can print then set the General and Cut Sheet dialogs accordingly. ** SPEC_PRI.IMG here Papyrus 5 has an undocumented feature which prints the margins and guide lines (and is also very handy for setting up labels). In the Document display settings ([Shift]+[Control]+D) check Object frames. Then in the Special Printing Options, check Print like screen display before printing. This prints a fine line at the document margins. Set the document margins just inside the printer margins. If they do not print exactly as per your document margin settings, adjust them both until they do then save your printer margins. There are two ways to do this: ** UL ** * All printer settings are saved by the General Save Options command ([Control]+E). * Individual printer settings can be saved as a file from within the Printer Setup dialog - the file extension is PRI. ** /UL ** ** DOC_DISP.IMG here Cut-Sheet Dialog Some tips for Page printer owners. Firstly, these cannot handle fanfold paper so don't check this option! Secondly, if you have one of the better laser printers you may not wish to check both the auto and manual single-sheet printer papers. The only difference this makes to Papyrus is that it forces an additional "Are you ready?" dialog between sheets. ** MAN_DIAL.IMG here Some printers accept code that instructs it to ignore the bin full of paper and to wait for a sheet to be placed in the manual guides. The only place to insert that code is in the Start of Page line in the cut-sheet dialog. To select this feature, two different Qualities have to be set up, one for manual feed, with just that paper type checked, and another for autofeed with that paper type checked. Giving the Qualities suitable names such as 300 dpi manual and 300 dpi autofeed makes the settings clear in the Print dialog. Pin printer owners can add special codes in the Start of Page line. For example, some printers accept code for "parking" the paper in the tractor feed. Place such code in the Start of Page line of this dialog. Place the opposite, "use tractor feed" code in the Start of Page line of the Escape Codes dialog, which is only used for fanfold paper. Escape Code dialog All I can suggest here is that you'll need some documentation to understand the code in the driver you are starting with. The Papyrus manual is quite helpful here. Note the syntax details shown on page 227. If you experiment, make sure that you save each version as a different PRI file. This helps you to backtrack over failed experiments. Pin printers which do not use data compression can be made to work faster if there is code available for the Positioning and Vertical advance lines. Colour dialog This has no effect unless Colour is selected in the General dialog. For mono users, the brightening setting is set in the Print dialog. Colour users can expect a certain amount of experimentation here, particularly with the Brightening settings. On some printers, these differ depending on the type of paper used. Again, different settings can be saved as different Qualities. And still to come. Judging by some of the emails I have received, a tutorial on labels and forms is in order. Meanwhile, if you are having label printing problems, check those printer margins. Wishing you perfect printing... ** Other images ** PAP5_ES1.IMG ** NVDI_CC.IMG ** caption ** Note the similarity between the Papyrus and NVDI dialogs ** /caption ** ** PAP5_COL.IMG ** PAP5_GEN.IMG ** PAP5_CS1.IMG