Documentation forÉ StyleRighter v1.0 A program to help right what's wrong with the StyleWriter. by Jeff Dickson March 1993 This program is ReplyWareÉsee below Spring 1992 and the Apple II world rejoiced as the long-awaited System 6.0 finally arrived for the GS. One of the brightest hilights was the introduction of the StyleWriter printer driver which opened the door for a marriage between Apple's best computer (the GS!) and their very economical and high-quality inkjet printer. The honeymoon didn't last long. Two big problems surfaced: Text spacing and graphic printing. Anyone who's tried using multiple type styles on a line, or full justification, knows how AppleWorks GS has become WYSI-not-WYG. The problem with letter spacing lies deep within the StyleWriter driver, or even QuickDraw, and is beyond the likes of me to repair. But there is more hope for graphics. The "problem" with StyleWriter graphics is that grey tones are simulated by using vertical lines of varying widths. That gives all the printouts a distracting grooved appearance far inferior to that of the LaserWriter (intentional, I wonder?) But hidden within the current StyleWriter driver is the ability to do much better graphic prints. StyleRighter uses a vector-image technique to replace those ugly grooved pictures with professional half-tone dithered graphics. Not only are the grooves gone, but StyleRighter knows that there's a lot less contrast on a printed page compared to the screen, and lightens up your image accordingly. Unfortunately nothing's free, and in this case the price is speed. __________________________________________________________________  Program Operation  ¥ First make certain that "StyleWriter" is selected in your "DC Printer" Control Panel and then launch StyleRighter. ¥ Select the graphic file you wish to print. This can either be a raw screen image (type $C1) or an Apple Preferred Format picture (type $C0, aux $0002). You'll sometimes make a file selection, and have the computer come right back and ask for another. This means either you selected a packed graphic file of the wrong type (e.g. obsolete "PaintWorks" packed files) or the file is longer than 32K. Use something like Platimun Paint to load and save the picture in a useable format, and/or trim it down (StyleRighter only prints the top half of pageÐsized graphics). You can load a 640-mode picture, but the program doesn't treat it in any special way; results are unpredictable. Likewise, APF files with weird sizes (other than one screen wide), will break my decoder. ¥ StyleRighter will display your picture and covert it to greyscale. I'm using the same colorÐtoÐB/W remapping scheme as Platimun Paint and it works fairly well, but I'm open to suggestions. The chromaless image will then be vectorized, the current scan line indicated on screen. At this time, the program is turning the raw pixel data into pen movement commands QuickDraw understands. ¥ After the last line is converted, the program will redraw the screen using the internal vector tables and dither patterns. This will look very rough, but when downloaded to the StyleWriter at five times the resolution, the results are quite good. At the bottom of the screen will be a message such as "48.6% memory used." This indicates how much of the available vector space the graphic required. Cartoonish computer graphics will probably only take 10%, where as a scanned/digitized image could easily top 90%. ¥ The Print Setup and Job dialogs appear as your last chance to abort. Click "OK" to start printing, or "Cancel" to quit the program. None of the options are really useful; in fact, selecting 180 dpi guarantees failure, although I have no idea why. Just accept all the defaults. ¥ Printing will begin . . . eventually. My accellerated GS takes about five minutes to print a page. The program draws the image as fast as you saw when it did it to the screen, but the resolution overhead slows the StyleWriter driver way down. Under certain memory conditions, the Print Manager will decide to spool the document to disk. If you see your hard drive light start twinkling during the print, go fix a sandwich, because the disk access slows things way down. This is something I can't control. (A scratch file of about 650K is created in your System:Drivers folder, and then deleted.) ¥ StyleRighter will return to your program launcher when printing is complete. __________________________________________________________________ Although this program uses only standard Print Manager and QuickDraw routines, it's proven successful only with a StyleWriter at 360 dpi. If you have any success with other printers, I'd like to know! __________________________________________________________________  ReplyWare  This program is ReplyWare. That means that if you have a StyleWriter and this prgram is useful to you, tell me! How important would full-page printing be? I received a great suggestion to extract graphics from AWGS Page Layout documents and print them in "vector rez". Any other ideas? America Online: Colonel DJ CompuServe: 73617,3005 __________________________________________________________________  Versions  v1.0 Winter 1993 Now imports APF files up to 32K. Added greyscale pallette conversion and pattern indexing for "messy" pallettes. Improved "unbound" vector table speeds storage & playback while saving 80K RAM. Vector table expanded from 30,000 to 40,000 vectors. More than enough for any one-screen printout. Fixed tool declaration bug that hung the program whenever pop-up menus were selected. v0.1 Summer 1992 First public release on America Online only __________________________________________________________________ Legal Stuff: "Apple IIGS" and "StyleWriter" are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. "Platinum Paint" is owned by Beagle Bros./Quality Computers. ©1987 TML Systems, Inc. Certain portions of this software are copyrighted by TML Systems, Inc. Long live BASIC!