Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!princeton!udel!rochester!bbn!husc6!cca!mirror!prism!brian From: brian@prism.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: WordPerfect and Apple LaserWriter Message-ID: <206900084@prism> Date: Wed, 30-Sep-87 15:29:00 EDT Article-I.D.: prism.206900084 Posted: Wed Sep 30 15:29:00 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 3-Oct-87 05:48:44 EDT References: <497@leah.Albany.Edu> Lines: 79 Nf-ID: #R:leah.Albany.Edu:-49700:prism:206900084:000:4202 Nf-From: prism.UUCP!brian Sep 30 15:29:00 1987 We have been evaluating various pc-based word processors for use by our admin staff, and chose Word Perfect due to its industry acceptance, base of trained users, and availability of related services(accessories, training). Oh, I guess we considered performance as well :-). We have 50++ pc's here, of which at least 25 were going to be used with word perfect. All have ethernet, and All have (are going to have) PC-NFS for file and printer sharing through our two Prism Supermini computers (we are using Adobe's transcript software). Everything was going well in our evaluation of word perfect, until we had to test the laser printing of word perfect documents. We installed the software on our test pc, and attempted to print a document to our lasers through the network print facility of PCNFS. No luck. It seems (as others have discovered) that the printer driver is written with NO REGARD for the rules and suggestions made by Adobe for Postscript language program conventions. The files that were spooled were filled with control sequences and Hi-bit (using the eighth data bit) characters. Our Transcript queuing and resource administration software was not happy in the least. Sometimes the printers would hang, but we would NEVER get any information out. We traced it down to the fact that the header file that Word Perfect appends onto each document sent to the laser printer has a "magic number" that the transcript software does not understand. The transcript software thinks that the file is a regular text file, and attempts to print it that way. That doesn't work, since there are control and non-printable characters. The document gets rejected. Also, word perfect includes a control-D in the file that is sent to the printer. Transcript also sends a control-D after it dumps the file. The laser printer echoes the TWO control-D's, and confuses the transcript software. SO, I rewrote part of the pscomm.c program that comes with the transcript software to recognize a new "magic number" at the top of word perfect files, (which I made %!PS-WPERF-1.0 (in the flavor of troff etc)) and to not send the control-D at the end of the document (since there is one in all word perfect files). This at least caused the documents to print on our laser printers, and the transcript software to keep track of usage. I also modified the Word perfect header file to have the "magic number" as the first line (The file pscript.ps in the word perfect directory). Remember to remove the ending CONTROL-Z if you edit that file (I used debug). Once we were dumping files, testing for suitability began. Word perfect is only able to print in Courier font on a TI OmniLaser 2115. Not much better on the Apple Laserwriter; we get Times (which is what we want) but only Proportional spacing with a certain font size (A loss). What are we going to do? Use Microsoft Word. We could figure out the character widths ourselves for the fonts that we want, and incorporate them with the printer config program that comes with word perfect; however we have already invested enough effort in getting their program to work. We had called Word Perfect support about this, gave them all of the information, and found out that they knew that the Postscript driver is not that great, and to wait fo the newer version of the word processor that they have in beta. They had no justification for going against the Adobe standards for postscript format files. If anyone is using Word Perfect with the OmniLaser and getting proportional Times and Helvetica, I'd like to hear about it. I will help anyone get their Word Perfect working with their Transcript software, either sources are necessary, or the control-D needs filtering (don't forget the magic number at the top of the file). ---- Brian K. Moran -- brian@mirror.TMC.COM UUCP : {mit-eddie, ihnp4!inmet, wjh12, cca, datacube}!mirror!brian ARPA : brian@mgm.mit.edu TryThis: brian@mirror.zone1.com (we forward for .zone1.com) Mirror Systems 2067 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA, 02140 Telephone: 617-661-0777 extension 122 "17.82 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot." ---