Utilities For The Tough Jobs
The Age
Monday May 1, 1995
Modern printers are amazingly versatile - but there are some things that test their skills. Mark Casey looks at utilities that can help.
YOU want to do what? Print a CAD-generated image to a laser printer!
And you want to print a ``Happy Birthday" banner for a birthday party! Modern printers are amazingly ingenious, but there are some tasks they turn their print heads up at. If you need to do the impossible, you need to look for printer utilities, usually distributed as public domain software or shareware.
Among the 4500 items of shareware catalogued by SME Electronics (874 3666), there are 16 programs devoted to making printers do the impossible. Managing Director, Mike Pratt, said that they are very popular with dot-matrix printer and DOS users.
For instance, more and more businesses want to barcode their goods.
SME has four programs to solve this problem. Bar Code is one; it generates single, multiple and sequential bar codes on screen, and then dispatches them to any of three graphics printers. CodeMaker handles a greater variety of bar code standards.
Getting printable screen dumps is something many DOS users find frustrating. Shareware may be the answer. There are a number of utilities to do far more than simply dump the 25-line screen display that the standard BIOS does. FastDump is a good general purpose utility that prints screens up to VGA resolution on dot-matrix and laser printers.
Another beauty is Printer Control Program, which will print selected portions of a screen and works with any printer. There are several other utilities that offer this facility too, such as SPS and Snip.
If you want to save paper, there are at least two shareware utilities that print four pages to a single sheet of paper. MicroText and Booklet-Screen work with both LaserJet and dot-matrix printers.
Then there are utilities such as 2Col that prints text files in two columns, and Form Feed, which generates a form feed from any DOS-based program.
One of the more popular item of shareware allows users to print banners across multiple sheets of dot-matrix paper. Look for programs such as Bannerific and Print-Partner, which can also print calendars.
For sideways printing, say of DOS spreadheets, you might also look at SideWriter.
Pratt says that perhaps the most popular DOS printer utility is called Simply Labels. It can be used for mailing labels, disk labels, cassette covers, name tags and other user-defined label types, printing them onto almost any medium using you dot-matrix printer.
Other popular DOS label printers include Plain Vanilla Labels and DiskList, which prints disk sleeve inserts showing directory contents.
And there is a clutch of DOS envelope printer utilities, such as AE, which can store up to 200 addresses and drives 24-pin printers with an Epson emulation mode.
Batch file enthusiasts will find utilities to help them build print routines into batch files. LPTCHK returns error codes for things such as printer out of paper or printer off line.
There are several printer utilities for Windows too, although Windows applications tend to be better equipped for printing than their DOS counterparts.
One of the most popular is Print Envelope. Only one guess as to what it does. It is more of a mailing system, able to print multiple fonts, use addresses from other applications and supports a wide range of printers.
There are several printer control utilities for windows, such as Winptr, which make it easier to switch between printers, print screens, change print modes, all from a desktop icon, and PrintSwitch, which displays all currently displayed printers as icons. To change printers, simply click the appropriate icon.
If you have a scanner, you should also have Copier, a utility that turns your scanner/laser printer combo into a more than passable photocopier, with a full Windows interface.
For those working with CAD systems, there is even a utility to get around the problem of not having a plotter. Print-GL takes files destined for a plotter and prints them out on a laser or dot-matrix printer. You can even alter things such as pen colours and widths.
Some Windows applications allow printing of multiple document pages on a single page. But few can match Jetcol, which print ten document pages to a page, or 20 using both sides of a page.
OS/2 users shouldn't be forgotten, though some of these utilities may not be Warp compatible. Search OS/2 bulletin boards for Flextxt, which prints multiple pages on a sheet of paper, and PMEnv, which is used to print envelopes using any OS/2 printer. TXT2PS is a third utility that lets non-PostScript files be printed to a PostScript printer.
To obtain these utilities, and many others, contact local shareware dealers (try the Green Guide) or look for them on bulletin boards such as the Melbourne PC User Group BBS (699 6611, 699 6644).
© 1995 The Age
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