Re: Incredible Disappearing Speedos

[Jordan Fox]

Kevin --

I ran some printing trials over the weekend. Once upon a time, I used to
carefully maintain a "XY-notes" file for documenting such things for future
reference, but alas I have strayed from this habit. So it's hard to
recall/guesstimate exactly what happened in the past. But I did juggle some
variables -- not every possible combo, though --
and here's what I found out, all of it (as usual) strictly empirical.

Firstly, UO is one of those Defaults that cannot be ordered from the CM; it has
to be embedded in the PRN file -- and maybe only once a session, per the
original PRN file loaded by STARTUP.INT ?

For test purposes, I had two different setups, in alternate H/D par-
titions. In C:\XY4 -- ver. 4.014, ST.INT loads HP-2 (with UO com- mented out,
IM=1 default). SET.DFL is virtually the same as the setup to follow, except
for printer listed at the end under the PP: line. With this setup, the
TypeFace Dir. shows me 34 Speedo fonts, all but two designated "*". They range
from Amerigo to Umbra and VAGrounded (whatever that is). Haven't used anything
like most of these, but from experience and a random sampling in these trials,
they seem to scale and do the other things you'd expect, and print out with few
problems. But there is NO choice of Symbol Set.

Setup #2: In D:\XY4 -- ver. 4.015 (have had this a limited amount of time, and
doubt it makes a diff.), ST.INT loads HP-4 (with UO commented out), IM=1 via
the alternate SET.DFL. With this setup, TypeFace Dir. shows me 16 Speedo
fonts, but a *different* group with only Courier in common. Fonts range from
Albertus to Univers_C. All are designated "" (in case that won't reproduce
here, it looks like Ascii 23 in the standard table.) The menus here will give
you a choice of up to 8 or 9 Symbol Sets, depending on the font. These seem to
print o.k. as well.

[BTW, whatever happened to PRINT.TMP? Still available as an option?]

Next, I started making some modifications. At one point -- still not quite
sure what I did -- I really lost it with an HP-2 setup. The TypeFace Dir. went
down to a choice of just Standard, LinePrinter, and (default, non-scalable)
Courier. Yikes! No Outline fonts at all! Even though the Screen and Outline
Font Dir. is still set to the normal C:\BTFONTS. I couldn't undo this for
awhile, and was concerned. [**Design Note** -- if the Path is correctly set, we
should be able to see *all* of our installed Speedos. Period. Settings in the
PRN file may affect which we can use, and how, but we should still see 'em!
If you decide you need to show some of them as unavailable (in a given setup),
use Inverse Video or something in the Type Dir. I could live with that.]

In a couple of other variations, I could scale Speedos, but the char. spacing
was not good. Some characters print too close together within a word and
between words, some too far apart. Sorry I did not document the above
variations specifically, but I may have more on that soon. And continued in
the next msg., note the results of loading the other PRN driver on top of the
one originally loaded.