A Short note to all users:- Due to disk restrictions the preferences program is not included on this disk. So it is best to copy the prefererence program from your workbench disk onto a blank disk and then copy printer pal to your blank disk. If you have any questions write to Storm (address should be elsewhere!). Printer Pal V1.0 By Roy Huntley ******************* NOTICE TO ALL USERS ******************* Printer Pal V1.0 is a shareware product. This means that if you find it useful you are, as with all other shareware products, morally obliged to send the author (me !) a donation. In return for this donation you will receive a letter of thanks together with a registered version of the program. This version will be unique to you, and as an attempt to prevent piracy of this version your name and address will be embedded in encypted form in the code. The new version will have the "75 line limit" (see later on in docs) removed as well as having some new features like on line help. The code is much more efficient than the shareware version. In addition to this, you will also be kept up to date with any other projects that I am developing. The suggested amount for registration of printer pal is £5.00. If you cannot afford this then please send what you can. (on the other hand, donations over £5.00 wont be rejected !). Send your donations, bug reports etc, to :- Roy Huntley 173 St Agnells Lane Grovehill Hemel Hempstead Herts HP2 6LQ ************ INTRODUCTION ************ How many times have you ran into problems when trying to print some text or some graphics from your favourite word processor or art program ? Do you get confused with all the different options and parameters ? If so, printer pal should be of use to you. It is designed towards beginners and it aims to take all the pain out of printing by making it as simple as possible for the user. ********* IMPORTANT ********* The first time that you use printer pal, click on the preferences gadget. The printer preferences will then appear before you, after a short bit of disk access. You must then select a printer driver which is compatible with your particular printer. Then alter the margins etc to figures that suit your printer and click on OK. Finally, click on the SAVE gadget. The printer pal program will flick back in to view after the preferences have been saved to disk. Once this has been done, it need not be repeated every time printer pal is used. ************ INSTRUCTIONS ************ Once you have followed the preference setting instructions as outlined above, you can now start using the program. Before you can print anything, it is necessary to load in some data - be it a text file or an IFF picture. To do this, click on either the LOAD TEXT or the LOAD IFF gadget. (For the sake of this example, lets say that we want to print some text.). So, after clicking on the LOAD TEXT gadget, the menu screen will fade and you will be shown a file requester. To access another drive or device, press the right mouse button once all disk access has finished. This will show you a list of all available devices. Once you have located the file you wish to print you can either click on the filename and then on the OK gadget, or, for speed you can just double-click on the filename. The requester will disappear and the menu screen will fade back in again. The selected text file will then be loaded into memory. Before you actually print the text file, you may wish to take a look at it. to do this, click on the VIEW TEXT gadget. The menu screen will fade out completely and the text viewer screen will appear. To move around the file you can use either the slide bar or the gadgets at the bottom of the screen. Once you have looked through your text, click on the EXIT gadget. This will exit the text viewer and present the main menu screen. To print the text, click on the PRINT TEXT gadget. A requester will appear, reminding you to make sure that your printer is on, paper in and the printer is on-line. When you have checked this, click on the PRINT gadget. A progress indicator will appear, showing you how many lines are left to be printed or sent to your printers buffer. Voila ! You will now have a hard copy of your text file. *********** THE GADGETS *********** LOAD TEXT - Loads an ascii file from disk into memory VIEW TEXT - Allows the user to look at the file to be printed PRINT TEXT - Prints the text file loaded into memory LOAD IFF - Loads an IFF file from disk into memory VIEW IFF - Allows the user to look at the picture to be printed PRINT IFF - Prints the Iff file in memory CLEAR BUFFER - Clears all memory used by text and/or graphics PREFERENCES - Loads the prefs program so configuration is possible QUIT - Leaves printer pal *********** LIMITATIONS *********** To encourage users to register, I have put a 75 line limit on the text file. If you try an load a text file with over 75 lines a requester will notify you and the program will load the first 75 lines of the file. ********** KNOWN BUGS ********** None as yet, but if you find one, please do tell me so I can fix it ! - END -