PRINTPOP A Printer Setup Utility by Robbie J Akins August 1987 PRINTPOP is a utility that was written to enable the user to simply send some common control settings to the PRT: printer device. It's origin is due to me having to fight all the time with the settings that Preferences sends (or more often, does not send) to my printer. Consider the following scenario: You have just started printing a large document to your printer. Your printer has got a large print buffer. You have a paper jam, and your printout is going haywire! The easy way out is to stop the printout and then turn off the printer to flush its buffer of all the information that it contains and reset the paper feed. Now startup the printout of your document again. This time things are even worse! Preferences has not send its copy of the printer settings to the printer again and you get another haywire printout because the printer has gone back to its powerup settings! It seems that the only way to get Preferences to send its settings is to actually change the printer chosen to something else, save the settings and then change back to the original printer. A real pain! Hence PRINTPOP. Now you can call this pop-up program at any time and send setup codes directly to the printer, bypassing Preferences. To install PRINTPOP, type the command: run PRINTPOP from the CLI. The program will install itself with a small sign on message. To install PRINTPOP in your startup-sequence, put a copy of PRINTPOP in your C directory and edit the startup-sequence file in the S directory to add the line: run C/PRINTPOP > NIL: (the redirection to NIL: will suppress the sign on message). Hence forth, any time that you want to invoke PRINTPOP just press the LEFT AMIGA key and the F1 function key simultaneously. If you are currently using a screen other than the Workbench screen, the Workbench screen will be brought to the front and the PRINTPOP window will appear. If you are already working on the Workbench screen, the PRINTPOP window will appear without changing the depth arrangement of any other screens. PRINTPOP Documentation - Page 2 The PRINTPOP window presents a number of gadgets: Draft/NLQ This toggling gadget allows you to select between draft quality printing and Near Letter Quality printing (if it is supported by your particular printer). Default Tabs This toggling gadget allows you to either set Set/Clear or clear the default horizontal tab settings on your printer. Print Pitch This "mutual exclude" gadget allows you to select 10/12/15/PS between 10, 12 or 15 characters/inch or else select Proportional Spacing. These pitchs may or may not be supported by your printer. Enlarged This allows you to turn on Enlarged printing mode in either the 10, 12 or 15 pitch modes and again may or may not be supported by your printer. Note that when Enlarged mode is selected with a print pitch of PS, that a character pitch of 10 cpi is selected and that the PS gadget is "ghosted". This is because Expanded printing makes no sense with a proportionally spaced font. Margins There are gadgets here for setting both the left and right margins. Pressing the appropriate left- arrow gadget will decrease that margin by 1, and pressing the right-arrow gadget will increase that margin by 1. The minimum margin values are 1, and the maximum values are 999 (should be enough for any printer I can think of!). Reset To Selecting this gadget will "ghost" ALL other Preferences gadgets, and will result in an initialisation set of codes equivalent to the current preferences settings being sent to the printer. This is one easy way of getting your printer and Preferences to be talking the same values! When you are happy with the settings you have chosen, close the window by pressing the window close gadget and the appropriate control sequences are sent to the printer currently assigned as the PRT: device. If PRINTPOP brought the Workbench screen to the front of any other screen you were using, you can restore your original screen by pressing LEFT AMIGA M. When PRINTPOP is first invoked, it will come up with a group of settings that are defined when the program is compiled. In the default case these settings are: NLQ / Clear Tabs / 12 cpi / Left Margin = 15 / Right Margin = 95. These defaults were chosen because they are usually what I want! If you want to change them I'm afraid you'll have to recompile the program with your own settings. Sorry! Note that the first time the PRINTPOP window is closed that the Amiga will load the appropriate printer driver (as defined by Preferences) from disk. Subsequent invocations of PRINTPOP will not cause this. PRINTPOP Documentation - Page 3 At certain times you may invoke PRINTPOP while the printer is in use by some other program. In this situation, when you close the PRINTPOP window, an "autorequester " will appear saying that PRINTPOP was unable to send the control sequences to the printer because it was already in use. Press the autorequester "PROCEED" button to carry on, noting that the settings you chose have NOT been sent to the printer. TRAP FOR YOUNG PLAYERS: When you first set up your Amiga and send a control sequence to your printer using PRINTPOP before you actually print anything, the Preferences will not know anything about that. Therefore, the first time you do any printing, the Amiga will send the Preferences settings to your printer, overriding any setup you did with PRINTPOP. Therefore, PRINTPOP should be used as a simple, convenient way of CHANGING your printer settings, NOT initialising them. CAVEATS: 1) PRINTPOP requires version 1.2 (or later) of the operating system. It will not function with earlier versions. 2) PRINTPOP has been tested with a number of different printers, but will not necessarily work correctly with all. This will not be a problem with PRINTPOP (I hope!), but will usually be due to the printer driver being used not being compatible with the actual printer. For example, the "official" Epson printer driver used with an original Epson MX-80 printer will cause spurious characters to be printed on setup because the printer driver supports margins, but the original MX-80 does not! Ackowledgements for the inspiration and sources of help for this program can be found in the listing of the "C" code for this program. There are no conditions on the use of this program. I hope you find it useful! The author may be contacted at the following address: Robbie J Akins BEC BCNZ P.O.Box 98 Wellington NEW ZEALAND.