Airprint betatesting

@SinanSam460

Could you send me a mail, and I have a new version you can test.

@mcleppa

Message sent...

@mcleppa

I normally run Final Writer 97 on its own screen. It appears that the AirPrint GUI window opened behind the Final Writer screen on the Workbench screen immediately after I launched Final Writer 97. AirPrint did not wait for me to open a document in Final Writer or wait for me to choose print from the Final Writer menu.

So, I changed the Final Writer prefs to open Final Writer on the Workbench screen.

I launched Final Writer again and immediately the AirPrint GUI window appeared, before I could open a document.

Final Writer has several printer options,
- graphics printer (final)
- graphics printer (draft)
- postscript printer
- postscript file

I did not try all of them, because the results were very confusing. In one case, I got a bunch of pages of garble in the airprint preview. In another case, I got a bunch of pages of text that looked like someone had taken the original copy and cut it up into tiny pieces and scattered the pieces on a table.

Nothing actually appeared of the printer, but I might have forgotten to click the print button in the airprint window.

The actual document was a single page document.

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redfox

P.S. With NotePad and AmiPDF, I did not see the airprint window until after I chose print in the menu.

With Final Writer, the airprint window appeared immediately after I launched Final Writer, before I had a chance to open a document.

@redfox

I´ll put it on my list to make it work correctly

@mcleppa

Thank you so much. Meanwhile, AirPrint works fine for plain text documents and pdf files.

---
redfox

@redfox
@mcleppa

I've been playing a bit with printer drivers myself, so I took a quick look at FinalWriter.

Quote:
FinalWriter opens the printer device briefly when it first starts up, in order to query the printer to determine its resolution. Airprint may be confusing this with a request to print something.

Quote:
When using "Graphic (Final)" mode, FinalWriter uses 'striped' printing, where it divides the page to be printed into a bunch of horizontal stripes, each the full width of the page but less than the full height (a holdover from the days when many Amigas did not have enough memory to handle a full page of graphics all at once). FinalWriter appears to do this even if the printer driver tells it that it does not support striped printing. That may be what's causing this problem.

Incidentally, FinalWriter's "Graphic (Draft)" print mode is mis-named; it actually uses the printer device's text mode to print only the document's text, using the printer's built-in fonts.

@msteed

Thank you very much for this input, this helps me a lot

@all

Version 0.365 now supports Xerox Workcentre 3225 LaserJet

@msteed

Thank you so much for your explanations.

Cheers,
redfox

@pjs

Thanks for walking me through that. Adapting your instructions for use with AmiGS, I got a nice printout with only some minor glitches in producing a smooth gradient circle. Fonts were good.

When trying to do it with the commandline parameters you wrote out, I kept getting the message: "**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting." I had read in the GS documentation that an assign was needed. So I put an assign for gs in the user-startup and rebooted. But I always get the same message.

But basically, I have the process I need now to print from PgS. Thank you!

Paul

@mcleppa

Sorry for the late reply. I had something working to print from PgS directly in the past, but nothing recently trying to incorporate airprint. I had actually given up using PgS seriously on the Amiga because of it, and reverted to using PgS on Windoze. With PJS's instruction on the PS > PDF conversion, I could go back to the Amiga, now.

Paul

@Paul

HI,

Sorry! I forgot to add a couple details on the use of
ghostscript... It is a fussy program!

I do have an assignment to ghostscript's directory
("GHOSTSCRIPT:") and I always cd to that directory before
using it.

Fortunately, with the Amiga shell that's trivial, type "gh",
hit the tab key and then return and you're there.

Then I usually set the stack to 1000000 to avoid other issues
with gs not allocating enough stack. Since I use gs a lot, I've
set an assignment ("ss") to do "stack 10000000" quickly.

Naturally, with an Amiga there are so many ways this all could
be automated... F.e., you could have an ARexx script running
to watch a PS files dir and having make/show PDF files for you
on the fly?

There's no end to Miggy hacking fun. :D

Good luck,

PJS