[Date Prev][Date Next][Subject Prev][Subject Next][Date Index][Subject Index]

Xy4: STANDARD.PRN and GhostScript/PCL printing



I'm posting this on the chance that it might solve a mystery for someone else. Some years ago I
discovered a pitfall of loading STANDARD.PRN as the initial printer file in XyWrite 4. If you
subsequently try to print to PDF via GhostScript or PCL, for example, with Kari's GHOST437.PRN, the
formatting commands in the XyWrite file do not take effect in the PDF printout. Evidently some
residue of STANDARD.PRN stays in memory and interferes with the printing process.

Since I print only sporadically, I usually start out with NO.PRN, an empty printer file that serves
as a placeholder. If I later want to load a GS printer file, it does no harm. Suddenly, a couple of
days ago, the formatting once again wasn't taking effect in my PDF printouts. After some sleuthing,
I realized that I had edited my PP: printer table so that the SETP command that used to load NO.PRN
was now loading STANDARD.PRN. Luckily, I had documented the STANDARD.PRN anomaly in my STARTUP.INT,
so things were soon put to rights.

I like to document this sort of detail, to make our list archives as potentially helpful as
possible. Freelists.org has a searchable archive, of course (https://www.freelists.org/archive/xywrite),
going back to 2009, but the richest resource is still Robert Holmgren's XySearch (https://xywrite.org/XySearch/XySearch.php), a
font of XyWrite-related posts from multiple sources, dating back to 1987. XySearch has a powerful
search syntax, and it is blazingly fast.

-- 
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxxxx