Solution: XyDos & USB/Windows-only printers

["Jon Inggs" joni@xxxxxxxx]

A diehard XyWrite 3 colleague has just bought a USB HP DeskJet
printer for his Win98 PC (largely for his wife who uses M$Word). He
asked me to see if I could get XyWrite to print on it.

Is the following necessarily the simplest & cheapest solution?:

1) LOAD a Xy3 PS printer driver (I dredged out one I customised for
the local branch of Macmillan publishers back in 1990).

2) TYF the document to a PS file.

3) Open the PS file in GhostView (freeware) and print to the
USB/Windows-only printer using its own Windows printer driver.

Obviously the same would apply to Xy4Dos with a PS printer driver.

In passing I noticed that GhostView32 Version 3.6 does have the ability
to convert PS files to fairly respectable PDF files with minimum hassle.

I have been converting our department's largely WordPerfect-
generated study material to PDF format for distribution via the Internet.
Some of the documents are fairly maths intensive and it took me weeks
to sort out the mathematical symbols in Acrobat Distiller because the
WPMath fonts are copyrighted.

The GhostView conversion worked out of the box - the only diffence
being that its PDF file was twice the size of the Acrobat one.

In Xy4Dos I now exclusively use a PS driver and print via PDF because
most of my output is study material which has to be PDF ready in the
long-run anyway.

Regards
Jon Inggs
-------------------------------------------------------
Try the Economic History Society of Southern Africa
WWW site at: http://home.intekom.co.za/joni/ehsoc.htm

Jon Inggs        e-Mail: inggsej@xxxxxxxx
Economics Department
PO Box 392
UNISA
0003
South Africa