Re: Xy4: STANDARD.PRN and GhostScript/PCL printing

[Kari Eveli <lexitec@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carl,
When using the Service Pack installers to make a standard setup, this 
kind of mishap does not happen. They make a pick printer table at the 
end of settings.dfl. If you do a custom setup with Update, you should 
copy this from settings.mdl. Afterwards, I would recommend using the 
menus to change printers. This assures that everything works. Normally, 
you can manage with only the default ghostxxx.prn and pclxxx.prn 
printers. Just recently, tha value of the GS printer drivers became 
evident. Any print output produced by this means can be copied and 
pasted into Unicode-compliant applications (no need for conversion 
programs in this direction). This applies also to CP866X.
I cannot agree more with Carl that Robert Holmgren's XySearch is an 
invaluable source of information. Some things have been forgotten by us 
along the way. There are important tidbits out there.

Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxxxx

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> 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.