GeoPublish Tutorial Part 23 – Printing Part 2

It is quite amazing to sit here in the year 2005 and look back at 17 years of PostScript (PS) Printer output of my GEOS files. The ability to get near-typeset quality output from my Commodore has to be one of the big reasons that I still use the venerable computer. It wasn't always easy, though. Many people contributed to the development of the process we take for granted these days.

Randy Winchester was likely the first person to tackle the shortcomings of the original geoPubLaser (gPL) that we discussed in the previous installment. His AntiGrav Toolkit series of articles in geoWorld magazine detailed methods to get around the limitations of a program that expected a Laser Printer to be directly connected to the computer. All of his articles are available on the GEOS page of his web site (http://web.mit.edu/randy/www/antigrav) and are still worth reading if you never have for no other reason than to appreciate how easy things are today.

Jeanine Cutler bought an HP Laser and wrote a couple of articles for geoWorld about her adventures with GEOS Laser Printing. Jeanine provided lots of advice and assistance to many people in the early years and helped a young programmer test a great piece of software we are going to look at this time.

David B. Ferguson, a gifted programmer who wrote NewTools and other GEOS gems, contributed to PS Printing by outlining the steps he took and the things he learned using a PS Laser Printer without owning one in The GeoPublish Compendium.

K. Dale Sidebottom spent vast sums of money to buy PS Laser Printers and also joined the Adobe Developers Association to learn more about the intricacies of PS. Dale has also created the Laser Lovers' Disk which contains a wealth of information gleaned from his many years of PS printing. Dale was also the driving force behind the creation of the second program we are going to look at by yet another extremely brilliant and talented GEOS programmer.

The people I have mentioned above all played important roles in the evolution of PS Printing from our Commodores. However, what makes the process so easy today is a direct result of the talents of our two intrepid programmers.

The geoWizard!

Jim Collette was in his early teens when he created the PS.Patch program we discussed in the previous article. Over the next few years he wrote some truly amazing software including geoWizard which lets you halt one program, load another one and then return to the same spot in the first program as if nothing had ever happened. This was an amazing accomplishment and was extremely useful for many.

Jim's PS.Patch program provided GEOS users with a very easy way to print their files to disk in preparation for transferring to a PC or Mac for PS Printing. Jim next came up with a wonderful program called PS.Processor (PS.P).

Just as its name implies, PS.P takes the PS file you have written to your disk and processes it according to a script file you write in geoWrite. The script file makes use of any of the 8 available commands to tell the program how to process your PS file. You can write a new file to disk, send the file out over a serial or parallel connection to a PS Printer, layout your pages in Portrait or Landscape mode and even print multiple geoPublish (gP) pages onto one page coming out of your printer.

Some of these things may not sound all that exciting but when you see what the program can do it really adds to the functionality we have with our Commodores and GEOS. Jeanine Cutler tested the program for Jim since he did not have his own PS Printer. She also created a bunch of sample files that come on the disk with PS.P and they do a good job of showcasing many of the features.

PS.P is available on the Collette Utilities Disk which was recently released to the Public Domain. A .D64 image is available from the Downloads page of the CUE web site (http://members.shaw.ca/cue64/download.html).

My review of PS.P in Issue #22 of Commodore World magazine outlined how to design a single business card in gP and use PS.P to print 10 copies onto one page. I am not going to repeat that here but will say that if you are serious about PS Printing from your Commodore (and if you are still following this gP Tutorial you must be) you absolutely have to have PS.P as part of your software library.

Renaissance Man

Maurice Randall would have to be considered a true rarity in the world of Commodore computing. He earns his living running an auto repair shop and he also raced cars professionally (including NASCAR). Maurice has written some of the most amazing GEOS software (after all, there is only 1 FAX program for Commodore's) and he took over the line of CMD hardware products a number of years ago.

I could go on and on about the various programs Maurice has written for GEOS (not to mention the terrific Wheels upgrade for the entire system!) but I am going to focus on a program he wrote, at the request of Dale Sidebottom, called PostPrint (PP).

In 1994 Dale was looking for a way to download a PS font to his Laser and asked Maurice to make an addition to geoSHELL to accommodate this. The laser COM file was the result. Dale's next request was for a GEOS program that would send a geoWrite file containing PS commands to a Laser. Maurice created PostPrint and it has continued to evolve since then to become a central command station that you could almost use as a replacement DeskTop.

PostPrint also supercedes PS.Patch and gPL since PP can print files to disk or output directly to PS Printers connected with serial or parallel interfaces. PP makes it easy to layout your gP documents onto different sizes of paper and PP is required to be able to print JPEGs along with your gP files.

PostPrint Project

PostPrint is what we are going to use to print the geoPublish Tutorial with. We are going to create a PP Project and tie all of our gP documents together. Let's get started.

There are 2 versions of PP. The biggest difference between PP2 and PP3 is that PP2 does not require any expansion RAM. PP3 will soon require the user to have a SuperCPU and SuperRAM card with some available RAM. SuperText is an application that PP3 has for editing large files such as PS ASCII. For really impressive results PP lets us add EPS files or JPEG images to our Projects.

Start PP (either version) and click on the LAYOUT Icon. Press the Create button, type TOTALTUT and press RETURN. The default paper style (Letter 8.5 * 11 portrait) is what we want so press the OK button. Choose which drive you want this file to be created on and press OK. It is best to create the PP Project on the disk where your gP files are located.

The PP Project file opens and you see a page of paper on the screen. From the 'paste' menu choose 'geopublish file', click on 'TutorialCover' and then press the Open button. The file will be added to the PP Project and the Status Box in the lower left corner will soon show that we are on page 1 of 10.

Use the 'options' menu to 'goto page' 10. Now, use the 'options' menu to go to the 'next page'. Press the OK button to create a new page just the same as in gP. Now add our TutorialPart1 'geopublish file' with the 'paste' menu. After you have done that you will see you are on page 11 of 26. 'Goto Page' 26 and then create the 'next page'.

Once you are on Page 27 add our TutorialPart2 file with the 'paste' menu. 'Goto Page' 41, create a 'next page' and 'paste' in the TutorialPart3 file.

'Goto Page' 50 and create the 'next page'. From the 'paste' menu choose the 'geopublish page' option. Select the Poster file and press the Open button. We now get presented with a dialog box that lets us paste in any page from this gP file. Accept the default of '1' by pressing the RETURN key and our poster will get added to our PP Project. We won't paste in TutorialPart4 or AppendixA since they aren't complete yet.

The file menu gives us three options. The first will take us back to the Project Create/Open dialog box. The second will take us directly to the Print dialog box. Click 'exit' to return to the main PP screen.

PP Print Icon

This is where the rubber hits the road. The whole point of our little exercise, or any publishing venture for that matter, is to get the material onto paper and into the hands of our readers. Maurice has provided an amazing array of print options for us. Click your mouse button on the PRINT Icon.

Here we have 4 options. Starting from the bottom up 'Cancel' is fairly obvious. The 'Config' paper size button lets us set regular 8.5" * 11" paper or A4 paper which is commonly used in Britain and Europe. The 'Config' output ports button lets us set the address and speed of a SwiftLink or Turbo232 and the speed of RS232 communications along with PAL/NTSC timing. Click the 'Select' print job button.

Here we see how PP has evolved from simply printing geoWrite files containing PS commands. We can still do that plus send ASCII PS files, geoPaint, geoWrite, gP files and PP Projects. Select PP Project (the default) and press OK. Choose our TOTALTUT file in the DB that pops up and press the Open button.

The next DB provides us with quite a few options, some of which are dependent on others. If you have a color PS Printer to use for output click your mouse in the Color box. If you want to print your file to disk and create an EPS file click in the EPS box. The PS Level box toggles between 1 and 2. The EOL box toggles between CR - LF - CR/LF and sets the end-of-line character which differs depending on which computer you will read the file with.

From the earliest version of gPL there was a problem where the Printer did not get properly reset after each print job was sent. This caused subsequent printouts to get a little smaller. Sending a CTRL-D character to the printer properly resets it.

The next boxes show you which pages you will print. The box at the bottom of the screen tells you the name of the file, chosen paper format and number of pages in the file. If you don't want to print the entire file enter the starting and ending page numbers in the From/To boxes. Use the INST/DEL key to clear the box and press the RETURN key after entering the desired page number. Use the same method to set how many copies of each page you wish to print.

The 'Output source' box is what makes PS.Patch and gPL obsolete. From here we can choose any of 7 output methods for our Project. If you have connected your Commodore to a PS Printer choose the appropriate option. If you want to print your project from another computer choose the disk file option.

My PS Printer (connected with a geoCable II) has a duplexer built in so it automatically flips the pages and I get double-sided printouts. This comes in very handy for some jobs but especially when printing a PP Project file. If you don't have a duplex printer you will find the 'all/odd/even' and 'fwd/rev' boxes very handy. These control the way PP sends the file to the printer and make it easy to get double-sided printing.

One gPL option that is absent from PP is the smoothing function. Maurice felt the same as I did - it never really worked all that well so he saved the code space and dropped smoothing from PP.

Anyhow, the options you choose in PP to print your Project will differ from the options I choose. You should now be able to create and print a Project file (or even just the gP files) with little or no trouble.

If you are printing a gP file there will be an EDIT button in the Print DB. Clicking on this will launch gP so you can edit your file. Quitting gP then brings you right back to the Print DB with your chosen options.

On Pages 35 and 37 the issue of color came up a couple of times. Maurice gave us the ability to add color with the B3.6 of PP in 2001. We have 32 patterns that can be used for Special Text or Graphics. The first 9 produce varying shades of gray. The remaining 23 produce different colors (see the B3.6 release News in Appendix D for a chart). Since it is tough to edit items once a pattern has been applied the best time to add color is now, when you are all done and ready to print. Customize your copy of the Tutorial by adding color to some items.

Next time we will learn some new tricks that gP now has up its sleeves.

Until then, enGEOy your Commodore!

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