The printer driver problem is as old as Calamus itself. Unfortunately in the early days of Atari computers there were few standards. The VDI/GDOS provided was not very powerul and had many limitations.
For this reason Calamus had its own printer driver concept developed for it. As a result a special Calamus printer driver had to be made available for every printer. That was the usual method for many applications for a long time.
Since then some very powerful VDI extensions have appeared, of which NVDI from Behne & Behne Systemsoftware has become the best known. There are many VDI printer drivers from which most of the commonly used printers can be accessed.
With MagicMac an additional problem arose: The Mac printers could not be addressed directly by a lot of Atari software. There were also no corresponding VDI drivers that would have made output even possible. Power-Print or MacSTout offer a relative simple solution for this, though neither can control the normal Apple printers.
In the meantime an NVDI also exists for the Mac, which can make a printer installed on the Mac side available as a VDI/GDOS device.
However, we no longer recommend VDIPrint for accessing Mac printers, but the much easier to use MacPrint, which you can also find in the standard Calamus SL distribution.
