When you click on this button, you will be able to load a printer driver. This is necessary because different printers are controlled in different ways. In the past, every manufacturer designed their printers with a different command set, but today there are several standard drivers. Calamus is supplied with a driver for most printers that are capable of printing graphics. Click on the desired driver in the file selector and then press [Return] or click on [OK]. The list of available printer drivers is constantly updated. If you have difficulty installing your printer, your dealer will be able to help you.
When you have loaded a printer driver, the following message will appear in the top section of the dialog box:
The buttons supply basic information:
This is the name and type of the printer supported by the driver. This does not have to be the actual name of your printer, since many printers are compatible with each other. Among dot matrix printers, for example, Epson and NEC are standards. Nearly all dot matrix printers on the market support these standards, so only these two drivers are necessary. The same applies to laser printers where the HP Laserjet command set has become the standard. Unfortunately, there are always exceptions to standards, so the actual list of printer drivers is rather large. (You do not have to keep all of the drivers on your hard drive; only the ones you use). For Calamus to print correctly, your printer must be compatible with the driver shown.
Several output devices, notably laser printers, cannot print on
the entire surface of the page. As a result, you should place all
frames a minimum distance from the edge of the paper. Of course, this
minimum distance varies from printer to printer. When you load a
printer driver, guidelines are loaded to mark this minimum distance.
Moreover, the printable area of the page is shown in the Create
tiling frames automatically
dialog box (see Frame editing,
Special functions
).
This line shows the currently selected resolution of the printer in dpi (dots per inch). This measurement format may be unfamiliar to those used to metric units of measurement, but it has been adopted as standard for printers. Therefore it would not be sensible to recalculate it to pixels per centimetre. Most dot matrix printers support several resolutions, allowing you to print rough drafts (low resolution = few pin strikes = high speed) or final drafts (high resolution = many pin strikes = more time consuming). You can select resolution with the popup. Laser printers usually work with a fixed resolution (eg 600x600 dpi), but to adjust for production tolerances and other manufacturing variables, you can adjust the horizontal resolution of some laser printer drivers within narrow limits.
The paper size selected here will be used for output. Paper size
is independent of a document's page format which you set up in the
Page module. Naturally, you can print an A4 page on A3 paper, but part
of the page will be blank. If you want to print an A3 document on A4
paper, the bottom part of the document will be missing. Tiling frames
(see Frame editing
module) help here, since they allow you to
print different parts of a document page (tiles) on any number of
separate printed pages.
The popup allows you to select one of the paper formats available
for the printer. After clicking on one, you will see next to the name
the paper size in the units which you selected in the Page module,
Set units of measurement
. The Special
size (only
available for a few printers) corresponds to the largest size the
printer can handle, and cannot be changed. This has nothing to do with
the user-defined page format that was defined for the document (see
Page module
).
If the selected printer has more than one type of paper feed, you can chose one in this popup. Dot-matrix printers usually work with continuous tractor feed, manual feed or automatic feed. With laser printers, you can choose from different paper trays or manual paper feed. With manual paper feed, printing will stop after each page and you will be prompted to insert a new sheet of paper. When you have done so, click on the [OK] button or press [Return] to continue printing.
In the upper area of the dialog which is used for the printer
specific parameters you find a popup called Colour depth
. Most
of the printer and output drivers only support one fixed colour depth
in the current output mode. Other output drivers (like the MacPrint
printer driver) may offer a range of options here.
This button is generally only selectable if a more complex printer driver (e.g. MacPrint, WinPrint or VDIPrint) is loaded, where more extensive adjustments are required than are offered by the Print dialog. If you click on this button, then generally a further dialog opens into which you can enter more specialized parameters for the current printer driver.
With WinPrint the standard printing dialog of MS Windows (!) appears, in which you modify the printer parameters which the current system printer of your Windows system offers. If you exit the Windows printing dialog, the modified parameters are transferred to the Calamus Print dialog. You can also change the current Windows printer in the Windows printer dialog.
Further descriptions of the dialogs that lie behind this button can be found in the description of the respective printer driver.
Note: The button text itself can change – depending on the implementation and language of the loaded printer driver.
If you simply want to test
the print output without sending
data to the printer, switch on the Dummy mode here.
There are several ways to connect a printer to your computer. The majority of printers use the parallel (Centronics) interface. Some also send data through the RS232C serial port. An exception was the old Atari laser printers SLM 804 and SLM 605 which could be connected to the DMA port.
Several output devices can operate over the SCSI interface (say
scuzzy
), and data is essentially transferred as quickly as via
the DMA port. If your printer can use either the parallel or serial
port, you should choose the parallel port because it is much faster.
While an A4 page at 300x300 dpi takes from 20-200 seconds to go to the
printer through the parallel port (depending on the printer used and
the data sent), it takes over 9 minutes (!) to send the same data
through the serial port.
Finally, with some drivers there is the Other
interface
option. If you select this field, Calamus will send the information
via your operating system or to a diskette, hard drive or file server
instead of directly addressing your computer's hardware. Usually, this
option is appreciably slower than direct output, but if several
computers are sharing the same printer over a network, you will have
to choose Other
to use the network. The interfaces which a
particular printer driver supports will be selectable in the popup.