(partial) WABI printing problems.
triumphs - well almost.
A couple of days ago I wrote;
> SPARC 10 with Solaris 2.3 & OpenWindows 3.3. Printing via a remote
> SPARCPrinter using NEWSprint 1.0
>
> WABI 1.1 installed plus Microsoft Excel (v4), Microsoft Windows. Two
> printing problems have come up under WABI 1.1 and 1.0.
>
> a) No matter how hard I try I cannot print an Excel Spreadsheet to a
> postscript file! I change the printer to Postscript on LPT1, select
> encapsulated postscript, toggle the print to file and give a file
> name. After all this the Spreadsheet still appears at the printer!
> Has anyone else seen this behaviour or can tell me what I'm doing
> wrong?
>
> b) Most of the printed Excel Spreadsheets (I have lots of these after
> the problems above) contain charts. These charts look fine on the
> screen but the printed version has the chart title, legend text and
> x-axis label all truncated vertically. I have tried to adjust the
> text positioning, change font and even change the Trytype-to-Postscript
> conversion table. All to no effect. Placing a border around the
> text suggests that the printed text is being displaced vertically.
> Any suggestions or other help greatly appreciated?
Several people have responded, in most cases with 'me too!!' requests.
I decided to post an initial summary now because I'm on holiday for a couple
of weeks. If anything more comes in I will update the summary.
There were no complete solutions but one important work around was given by
steve.lee@pnw.opensys.com. He writes:
> I had this happen with Wabi 1.0 and MS-Project 3. My solution is to go into
> Windows Setup and change the printer designation from lpt1: to FILE:. Then,
> when I print, it prompts me **always** for a file name. This seems to work.
> (I need to do this because I've got to take the eps file and print it on
> an HPLJ4m to get the text to align correctly...this seems to be a problem
> with Newsprint, not WABI.
Following his advice works. I can save the Excel charts to encapsulated
postscript files now which was my first problem.
The suggestion that the mis-alignment of the title and label text comes from
a NEWSprint fault (I am using NEWSprint 1.0) was suggested by several people.
Now that I can generate postscript files I have been able to view them using
'pageview' and 'ghostscript'. In both cases they appear on the screen perfectly.
So it looks like a NEWSprint problem. Anyone out there having better results
with NEWSprint 2.x?
There are a couple of other points to watch for with the encapsulated
postscript file;
+ every line has ^M at the end, use dos2unix to get rid of these
+ there is a ^D at the end of the file which my printer complains
about - delete it and all is well
I was able to restore the text alignment by manually editing the postscript
file and adding 25 to the vertical position of the misplaced text, eg;
145 856 743 (hello) 743 SB
goes to
145 881 743 (hello) 743 SB
not exactly elegant but it works.
Thanks to:
steve@pnw.opensys.com (Steve Lee)
glenn@uniq.com.au (Glenn Satchell)
jvictor@aule-tek.com (Jeff Victor)
Dr Peter Watkins.
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