Re: Off-topic: VPC puzzles

[Carlo Caballero carloc@xxxxxxxx]

Thanks, Russ, for the additional information--all of it seemingly positive
and encouraging for users of VPC--and an inducement to upgrade to 6.0,
which was still a Connectix product. (What Microsoft did to ver. 6.1 and
upward may eventually be important to know, too.)

Quoting Russ Urquhart :
>
> When we talked offline, all i had used was the printf command in xy
> 4. Since then, and this discussion, i went ahead and tried just
> printing the current document, using vpc 6, from my powerbook,
> running OS X 4.3, connected to a HP PS printer via a wireless
> connection. I can report success!! (There is a way to setup your
> application, in this case XY, to use a default printer connected to a
> default port location. This is listed in the help.) So it does work!!
>

Great. Which of the Postscript PRNs do you happen to be using in XY4? In
VPC 3.0, at least, VPC counts on the application to do the formatting
before passing the file onward to the printer.

>
> At least under VPC 6, as i understand it, the application that you
> want to print from has to be setup properly. Since XY4 knew nothing
> about USB, I have my XY4 setup to send output to LPT1 with an
> AppleLaserwriterII driver. After that, printing from VPC works.

Right. And that's interesting, since our only documented options in XY4 are
the forms "1," "2" (for desktop printers) and "LPT1, LPT2..., COM1,
COM2"
(for networked printers). [Customization Guide, p. 85.] As for VPC's
LaserwriterII setting, I wonder if all it's doing is preserving the
Postscript language and passing it on to the LaserJet. Others on this list
are more competent to comment on these details. At this point, I'm not sure
whether the "1" vs "LPT1" within XyWrite is even doing anything in a VPC
emulation. Checking those variables against one another is beyond my means
at the moment, since I can't print yet (I can't check null results against
null results), but I did try playing with these values in SETTINGS.DFL, as
well as the SETP command in the start-up file.

Cheers,
Carlo


--------------------------------------------------
Carlo Caballero
Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa St
Stanford, CA 94305 USA

tel. 650-724-8128
CarloC@xxxxxxxx