GeoPublish Tutorial Part 22 – Printing Part 1

Finally! After 21 installments we are ready to talk about printing. And for once we don't have to do any planning.

The planning part was covered way back at the start. When we decided we were aiming for PostScript (PS) Printer output and chose the LaserWriter (LW) fonts we would use we were planning our printing phase of this publication. If we weren't planning for PS printing we would have chosen MEGA Fonts and other fonts that look better on dot matrix or inkjet printers. And that brings us to our first printing option.

Since geoPublish (gP) is a GEOS program you can simply select the Print item on the File menu and your gP file will print using your regular GEOS printer driver. If you do choose to use this option you are advised to make sure you have a multi-strike or interpolating printer driver for your printer. Regular GEOS printer output without enhanced printer drivers is well deserving of the bashing it gets from critics of the system.

When using this standard method to print gP files you will notice a couple of options that aren't present when printing a geoWrite file, for instance. The options for High, Draft and NLQ are not present in a gP print Dialog Box (DB). What you do have are options for Content, Layout or Master. Generally, you will always want to choose the Content option as it prints your entire document or as many pages as you specify in the From Page/To Page boxes. The Layout option prints the outlines of the Text Regions you created in Page Layout mode and the Master option prints the contents of your Master Pages (if you have two Master Pages as we do they will both get printed as long as there is more than one page in the gP file). You can select any or all of the three print options.

The Best Output

Luckily for us, Berkeley Softworks (BSW) had the foresight to create geoPubLaser (gPL) to send our files to PS equipped print devices. With gPL and the proper serial connection from the User Port to a PS equipped printer your documents will never look lousy again. And PS Printers print a lot faster than any Dot Matrix printer ever could.

While BSW stated that an RS-232 interface card and modem cable were required to connect to a PS Printer I found that a simple null-modem connection worked fine with the modem cable to give me a connection. What was also required for this setup was access to the printer configuration settings to make sure it would work. I set the NEC Printer I initially used to 9600 baud, PS batch files, RS-232 interface, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, Parity at Mark and Xon/Xoff for flow control. These settings allowed me to choose the 9600 Baud rate in gPL rather than the slower 1200 Baud rate setting.

For a while this direct connect method was our only option for PS printing. It seemed odd that BSW figured people running GEOS on a C-64 would have no problem laying out several thousands of dollars to have a PS printer sitting beside them. That NEC SilentWriter LC890 I used in 1988 and 1989 had a $6000 price on it! The store manager was a User Group member and let me use it whenever I wanted.

In addition to having the correct interface and settings you also must make sure you have the right software versions. You should really only use the two-disk version of gP, dated 10/4/88, and with that you need gPL dated 10/25/86. If you still use the buggier 10/8/87 gP then you need gPL dated 3/10/88. If you use the wrong versions together the results turn out very messed up.

The next progression in our printing journey allowed us to 'print' our gP documents to PS files on disk. These could then be transferred to other computer systems that were hooked to PS Printers (like a PC or a Mac at a copy shop). In order to do this you need the program called PS.Patch(2.0) by Jim Collette which patches a copy of your gPL so it will print the file to either Drive A or B. A few years later Jim created another version (PS.Patch(GC) ) that would patch gPL to use a geoCable parallel connection to a PS Printer.

With the file on a Commodore disk the challenge then became transferring it to a PC disk. Many methods exist for this including modem transfers, Big Blue Reader and geoDOS. The process to accomplish this is outside the scope of this tutorial. If you aren't sure join the discussions on the COPS mailing list. Make sure you name the file in ALL CAPS in GEOS or it won't be readable from Commodore BASIC or non-GEOS programs.

Smooth Operator

Just as the gP printer DB is different than the DB for geoWrite you will find that gPL offers a number of new options as well.

One that is fairly self-explanatory is the Copies box. Here you can enter the number of copies of each page of your gP file that you want printed. We have discussed the Thumbnail option a few times already. This will print all 16 pages of a gP file onto one page with each gP page reduced to 22% of original size. This is great for proofing the graphic placement on your copy before final printing.

An option we have not used so far is Smoothing. This option is available when placing Special Text or Photo Scraps. If you choose Smoothing when you place a graphic or special text gP tries to add extra pixels to smooth out the jaggies. For the most part I found that a lot of experimentation was required to get just the right size and the right setting for smoothing to get good results. As a result I just avoid using this option as the LW fonts provide unparalleled output quality when a PS printer is used and graphics can often turn out worse than they originally looked.

Nevertheless, the Smoothing option appears in the gPL print DB. There are 4 options if you click in this box. The default is 300 Dots Per Inch (DPI). This means that gPL will tell the PS Printer to draw this item at 300 DPI to help smooth out the jaggies. This can take quite a while to process. Your other options are 150 DPI, 75 DPI and NONE. My preference is to just not set smoothing on objects in gP and then you don't have to worry about this.

The final new option in the gPL arsenal is the 'Reduce to' box. This is actually mislabelled as it should be called 'Scaling'. You can enter a value in this box from 1 to 999. A value of 100 will print the document full size. Values less than 100 will reduce the document to that percentage of its original size and values greater than 100 will enlarge the document.

For example, if you entered a value of 22 in the 'Reduce to' box your gP pages would print out the same size as if you chose the Thumbnail option. The one big difference is that each page would print on its own piece of paper. If you entered a value of 300 it would cause your document to be printed over 9 pages of paper (3 rows of 3 sheets of paper). Crop marks are printed in the corners so you know where to cut the pages to fit them into one seamless, and large, entity.

If you are using a copy of gPL that you have patched with PS.Patch(2.0) you will find a file on your output device that contains all the PS Code to generate your gP pages. If you want to learn about PS Programming there are many very useful books available.

There is also a great resource created specifically for Commodore GEOS users and that is K. Dale Sidebottom's Laser Lover's Disk. This disk contains a wealth of information on how to modify the PS code created by gPL to add some very neat effects to your gP printer output. Also on the disk are all of the GEOS LW fonts including some updated versions with extra point sizes. Anyone who wishes to get the best possible printer output from their Commodore GEOS system should buy this disk from Dale. He is on the COPS list if you wish to contact him.

Next time we'll look at more print options with PS.Processor and PostPrint and see why, after learning all about it, we no longer need gPL.

Until then, enGEOy your Commodore!

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