"Personal Paint 7 - 10. Other Utilities" 10. Other Utilities Personal Paint comes with different utility programs and data files designed to work in the same environment in which the main program is used. This chapter describes some utilities stored in the "PPaint_Tools" drawer of the program disk. 10.1 AskAssign As explained in section "1.11" ("Environment Variables and Standard Drawers") it may sometimes be necessary to use the AmigaDOS Assign command to assign logical names. The AskAssign program, which comes with the Personal Paint package, can also be accessed with the mouse from the Workbench environment, rather than the Amiga Shell or CLI. AskAssign is also used by the InstallPPaint procedure. Section "1.13.1" ("Automatic Installation: The InstallPPaint Program") explains how to create drawers and select the directory (or volume) to which a logical name is to be assigned. When called by InstallPPaint, AskAssign is used to specify the position where the Personal Paint environment is to be installed. If AskAssign is executed as a stand-alone program (by double-clicking its Workbench icon with the mouse), an Amiga logical device name (like "PPaint" or "FONTS") may be assigned. The logical device name can be modified by editing the ASKNAME field in the Tool Types string gadget of the Workbench Information window. To do this, the Workbench Information menu must be selected while the AskAssign icon is highlighted (i.e. after a mouse selection). The texts displayed in the file requester may be modified by editing the other fields which can be displayed in the Tool Types string gadget. By default, the version of AskAssign which comes with Personal Paint is configured to assign the "FONTS" logical device name, if executed from the Workbench. 10.2 ColorText As explained in section "3.1.3.2", Personal Paint supports text editing using color fonts. Some multi-color fonts are also enclosed with the program. Amiga operating systems starting from version 2.0 support colored fonts directly. On previous versions, the ColorText utility must be used in order to integrate color font handling capabilities into the system software. ColorText was developed by Inter/Active Softworks, the creators of the original ColorFont format. On operating systems previous to version 2.0, ColorText can be enabled with a double-click on its workbench icon. Starting from version 2.0, there is no need to use ColorText to use color fonts. 10.3 HP DeskJet Drivers New HP DeskJet drivers (result of the joint development efforts of Cloanto and Commodore), are included on the program disk. These are the first versions of the drivers without the famous RLE compression bug. The 550C driver uses black ink in addition to cyan, magenta and yellow, and is not bound by the previous 10 inch size-limit. It also features improved cyan balancing code, compared to drivers previously released by Commodore. The DeskJet drivers use the Threshold value to activate a driver-local correction table. Using Personal Paint's 24-bit printing with these DeskJet drivers, Threshold should remain set to 1 (= no correction), and Density values of 4, 5 or 6 (which activate depletion combined with different levels of shingling) are generally not required. A value of 7 only activates shingling, which improves print quality. Several users have asked whether the enhanced HP DeskJet drivers supplied with Personal Paint support 600×300 dpi graphics output. It appears that some owners of DeskJet 560C and DeskJet 520 were misled by incomplete information. The advertised "600×300" printing capabilities of these models are mainly a result of RET (Resolution Enhancement Technology) applied to the 300×300 dpi print data. The printers cannot produce 600×300 dpi color graphics, and there is no documented command to send black & white graphics to the printer in 600×300 dpi. 10.4 Fonts Personal Paint comes with several color fonts and a font named "Personal.font". All fonts can be installed by the installation procedures. Personal Paint and the Personal Fonts Maker Color Extensions normally share the same Personal font for their user interface. The font itself has been upgraded a few times. On a system where different versions of these programs are installed, it may happen that one of the programs expects an older version of the font to be available. While minor changes are usually backwards compatible, if any characters appear to be incorrectly displayed it is sufficient to remove the font from the system FONTS: directory. All versions of Personal Paint and PFM2 also search for the font in their local directories, where the font is copied during automatic installation. If Topaz 8 is used for the Workbench icon texts, Personal 8 should be considered as a more readable replacement.