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Load driver

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:

Printer

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).

Printer resolution

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.

Paper format

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).

Paper feed

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.

Colour depth

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.

Ext. parameters

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.

Dummy mode

If you simply want to test the print output without sending data to the printer, switch on the Dummy mode here.

Output port

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.


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Last updated on December 12, 2015

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