MacFormat 1995 March/macformat-022.iso/Shareware City/Printing/Printer Defaults 1.3.2/Printer Defaults ReadMe

Text File | 1994-11-22 | 12.7 KB | 304 lines | [TEXT/R*ch]

Printer Defaults 1.3.2
----------------------

Printer Defaults is an application to modify the default settings in
printer drivers and similar Chooser documents such as print-to-fax and
print-to-document drivers. It has been tested on various machines
running systems 6.0.7, 7.0.1., 7.1, 7.1.2 and 7.5 and with a large
number of different printer drivers including LaserWriter 8.0, 8.1.1 and
8.2. If you want a more substantial range of patches for laser printers
then get hold of Don Markuson's dmm-laserwriter collection which is
available, for example, by anonymous ftp from mirrors of the Info-Mac
archive at sumex-aim.stanford.edu in the directory /info-mac/util or
/info-mac/prn.


WARNING!!!
----------

YOU SHOULD ONLY MODIFY A COPY OF THE PRINTER DRIVER, NEVER THE ORIGINAL.


Usage
-----

Launch Printer Defaults and use the Standard File dialog to select a
printer driver to configure (or drop one or more drivers onto Printer
Defaults' icon under System 7). This will bring up a "Page Setup"
dialog which you can use to select the new defaults. Clicking "OK"
will save these back to the driver, "Cancel" will go on without
saving.

For some printer drivers, there are some additional options which
cannot be accessed from the Page Setup dialog. If any are applicable
to the driver you are modifying an additional dialog will next
appear.

Finally, a "Print…" dialog will appear so that any changes already made
which affect its appearance can be seen, and, in the case of some
drivers, any settings in the "Print…" dialog which can be written to
back can be altered. This varies with the driver, and in any case
may still be ignored or modified at print time by the printer driver
or the application.


How it works
------------

Printer Defaults works by reading in the default settings for the
TPrint Record stored in the resource of type 'PREC' with ID 0 in
the driver and then doing a "Page Setup". Any changes are written
back to the driver and become its new defaults.

BUT, once a "Page Setup" has been done in a document, any application
may save a copy of PREC 0 in its own resource fork, or preferences
file, or settings document or each individual document and use this
in preference to the defaults in the driver for future calls to
Page Setup. Many word processors do this for each document. Subsequently
modifying the driver will not have any effect on these stored defaults.
TeachText always fetches the PREC 0 afresh so is a good way to test if
changes have stuck. There is a lot of this sort of cacheing going on
which can appear to defeat setting the defaults in the driver.


LaserWriter 5.x, 6.0, 6.0.1
---------------------------

The Print dialog of LaserWriter 5.x, 6.0, 6.0.1 contains a hidden
checkbox to allow printing of PostScript™ output to a disk file rather
than a printer. Printer Defaults can make this checkbox visible.


LaserWriter 7.2
---------------

A fore-runner of LaserWriter 8, LaserWriter 7.2 puts a ‘Setup’ button in
the Chooser to allow the printer to be interrogated and stores the resulting
information in a Preferences file. Printer Defaults can hide this button
which makes the behaviour closer to LaserWriter 7.x.


LaserWriter 8.x
---------------

LaserWriter 8.x (and Adobe's PSPrinter) uses a preferences file as
well as resources for storing its defaults. Some features may also
be read from a PPD (printer description) file and will override any
settings in the driver. So the strategy for setting the defaults
with these drivers is more complicated than with previous drivers.
Also the preferences file must exist or the driver will only give
an error message.

The preferences file is created by the driver when it is selected by
the Chooser so the first step is to place the LaserWriter 8.x
driver in the extensions folder and select it with the Chooser. The
preferences file will be created and various information stored in
it.

When Printer Defaults is run with LaserWriter 8.x, the information
in the "Page Setup" dialog is partly controlled  by resources and
partly by the preferences file.

For LaserWriter 8.x a second dialog of options will also be displayed.
Some are additional options from Don Markuson's collection of
LaserWriter patches which allow the use of the Setup button in the
Chooser at all times, and add the n-up printing menu to the Print
dialog. A final option allows the LaserWriter driver to be used
without AppleTalk. This is useful for PS File generation as it removes
the driver's ability to actually connect to a printer. LaserWriter
8.1.1 contains a PRFS -8192 resource, many of whose meanings are
unknown to me - I simply read the titles of the check boxes from the
TMPL supplied and allow the user to turn any of them on or off.

In order to set the driver up for a specific printer, use the Chooser to
select the LaserWriter 8.x driver and press the Setup button (if the
button is grayed out and you are using LaserWriter 8.0 or 8.1.1, use
Printer Defaults to check the box "Setup button in Chooser always
active" in the second dialog, save and then quit and then go back to
the Chooser). Then press the "Select PPD…" button and choose the PPD
file for your printer. Then press the "Setup" button and modify the
settings to match the hardware configuration of your printer. Save the
settings and close the Chooser.

Now run Printer Defaults and select the driver, set the "Page Setup"
buttons to the settings you want and click the "OK" button. In the
next dialog modify any settings as desired and click "Save".
Finally in the "Print" dialog press the "Options" button and make
any desired changes ABOVE THE DOTTED LINE. Press "OK" and then
"Print" to save the changes to the driver. Note that in the
"Options" dialog any settings below the dotted line are reset with
every print job so cannot be made to stick with Printer Defaults.
Sometimes they can be controlled by using switches on the printer
itself.

LaserWriter 8.x also makes it easy to lock the driver to print only a
single copy at a time. This has been added as an additional option.
This was originally #7 in Don's list of hacks. The June 1994 MacWorld
mistakenly said this hack was included in v1.1.1 of Printer Defaults.
To avoid having to keep explaining why it isn't I have added it to
v1.3 with one modification. It turns out that QuarkXpress (and perhaps
other applications) can be confused by turning the number of copies
entry box into a static text item as originally suggested by Don and
fails to add its own additional items correctly. So in this version of
Printer Defaults the number of copies is moved off screen and the
driver modified so that it will ignore any entry in this box if a user
attempts to type in a number blind.

If Printer Defaults finds a LaserWriter 8.x driver which has had
the number of copies changed to static text, it changes the type back
to edit text and moves it off-screen.


Third party drivers
-------------------

Although Printer Defaults has never crashed for me when modifying Apple
printer drivers, versions 1.3.1 and earlier did crash with some third
party drivers. I think I have traced the cause of this problem (see
the version history for the gory details). If you experience such a crash
then please let me know the name of the driver, its version number and,
if possible, the driver's creator signature (as given by ResEdit's Get
File Info command). For safety it is more essential than ever in these
circumstances that you only modify a copy.

The list of these problem signatures is stored in a 'CHOS' resource and
a ResEdit template is included in Printer Defaults to add signatures to
or remove them from the list.


Paper Trays
-----------

One of the most frequently asked questions I have received as a result
of distributing Printer Defaults is "How do I change the default
paper tray in my LaserWriter Pro 630?"

The default paper source is stored in the permanent memory of the
printer and can be modified by means of a short postscript program. In
the Paper Trays Folder are some postscript programs (courtesy of Ad
Herweijer) to set the default tray to the Main or 500-sheet Cassettes,
the Multipurpose Tray or Envelope Feeder tray. The factory default is
the Main Cassette.

Use the LaserWriter Utility supplied on the printer installation disks
to download the program to select the desired tray. You should then
also turn off "Automatic Tray Switching" in the "Paper Handling…"
dialog from the "Utilities" menu. The successful selection of the new
tray as default should be recorded in the LaserWriter Utility log
file (which saves using up more trees to find out ;-).

I've also included some programs to change the defaults on other
postscript printers that have a choice of trays (Personal LaserWriter
NTR, LaserWriter Select 310/360). These are untested and I would
welcome feedback on whether they have the desired effect.


Thanks
------

Thanks to the Mac-Supporter's mailing list (one of the NISP Mailbase
lists in the UK academic community) for being such a useful source of
Macintosh knowhow.

Thanks to Don Markuson for all those useful LaserWriter patches and
allowing me to include some in Printer Defaults. He was also kind
enough to comment on an early version of Printer Defaults and suggest
several improvements.

Thanks also to:

Ian Harries for bringing Don's LaserWriter 8 patches to my attention
which provided the initial stimulus to write Printer Defaults.

David Fagan for pointing out some problems with LaserWriter 8.

Ad Herweijer for the PostScript routine to change the default paper
tray.

Randy Hust for pointing out the MacWorld article which predicted the
addition of the locked copies option;-).

Mike Schon-Hegrad for reporting the problems with the DeskWriter
drivers and testing the FaxSTF driver.

Otto Giesenfeld for reporting problems with the FaxSender that comes
with the Express Modem Tool.


Copyright
---------

Printer Defaults is Copyright ©1994 by John Rawnsley but may be used
freely. You use it at your own risk. Always work on a COPY of the
printer driver, never the original.


Contacts
--------

Current versions of Printer Defaults can be obtained by anonymous ftp
from the Info-Mac archive at sumex-aim.stanford.edu or the University
of Michigan's MacArchive at mac.archive.umich.edu and their mirrors.
It is also available from the Macintosh library of the UK Computing
Forum (GO UKCOMP) on CompuServe where I am a sysop and from the ftp
server at the University of Warwick Mathematics Department at the URL
ftp://ftp.maths.warwick.ac.uk/people/jhr/Macintosh/


Internet: [e-mail]
CompuServe: 72662,3361
Mail: John Rawnsley
      Mathematics Institute
      University of Warwick
      Coventry, CV4 7AL
      United Kingdom



Version history
---------------
In version 1.3.2 of Printer Defaults a problem which could cause a crash
with some drivers has been identified. This was caused by locking some
driver resources in memory whilst handling the standard printing
dialogs. Printer Defaults now only keeps copies of these resources and
this seems to have fixed the problem. This version has been tested with
the release version of LaserWriter 8.2. I have added a dialog pointing
out that Printer Defaults does not yet work with QuickDraw GX drivers.
This might change if someone can tell me where the default paper type
is stored in these drivers.

In version 1.3.1 of Printer Defaults the additional options dialog for
LaserWriter 8.x has been modified to work with an alpha release of
LaserWriter 8.2 included on the 1994 World Wide Developer's Conference
CD. There is no guarantee that it will work correctly with the final
version of 8.2. It also adds an option to hide the Setup button in
LaserWriter 7.2 and includes some untested postscript files intended
to change the default paper trays on the Personal LaserWriter NTR and
LaserWriter Select 310/360.

Version 1.3 adds the ability to lock the number of copies in the Print
dialog of LaserWriter 8. This was mentioned in a recent US MacWorld
article as one of Printer Defaults options so I guess I had better put
it in. Some HP DeskWriter drivers cause Printer Defaults to crash
unless they are the currently selected driver in the Chooser. Printer
Defaults now checks for this and puts up a warning message if the
driver is not selected.

Version 1.2 adds Cmnd-Q to quit from Standard File dialog and an extra
option to display an error alert when parsing PPD files in LaserWriter
8.0. It also fixes a cosmetic bug which failed to change the name of
the folder button in the Standard File dialog to "System Folder" under
System 6. PostScript programs are now included to change the default
trays in the LaserWriter Pro 630.

Version 1.1.1 fixes a memory problem bug and has an improved
interface.

Version 1.1 added some of Don Markuson's patches for LaserWriter
8.x.

Version 1.0 was the first public release and allowed the user
to save the Page Setup settings as defaults. It allowed the
LaserWriter 8.1.1 PRFS resource to be edited.