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Messages - Alex Taylor

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211
FWIW, I'll be updating Workplace Sans to v1.01 fairly soon (hopefully within this month).

There are known problems printing plain text format using a TrueType font with PSPRINT. As noted in another thread on this forum, it seems to occur when word wrapping is enabled.  This seems to be some sort of PSPRINT bug, so I don't think updating Workplace Sans is likely to fix it, but by all means let me know what the results are.

There will hopefully be more work done on PSPRINT later this year.

212
Applications / Re: Web Fonts for OS/2 ?
« on: March 03, 2016, 03:48:40 am »
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That applies to the GA 1.3.x version.  The beta v2.0 version adds support for all OTF fonts.  (It's not on my main website because it is still beta, and has known bugs, but it's on my github and I think on Hobbes.)

Great, it works for installing OpenType fonts. But it brings in my opinion no better handling of font capabilites. At least not for mozilla apps that provide their own (broken) freetype. Some things work (black magic?) like german ligatur (tz ch) in entry fields (also in composer), but more common thing like "long s" don't. Every word should start with it by using a german font. In this case you have to check every small s in a text for the right setting by hand - quite boring. Also windows notepad needed a long time to support this (in win7).

Contextual substitution, which I believe is what you are referring to, uses the OpenType layout tables. So first of all the font itself must support it.  Moreover, this cannot be handled by the font driver, but is the responsibility of the layout engine. Effectively, that means it's up to the individual application to support it.

213
Applications / Re: Fonts in Lotus Word Pro
« on: March 03, 2016, 03:42:26 am »
The font (face) name is the key, which is what GPI uses to resolve the font (and that gets passed on to the printer driver).  So if you have multiple fonts with the same face name, the results will be unpredictable.  It's possible that WordPro was somehow getting the metrics (character dimension) data from the Type 1 font, but loading the characters themselves from the TTF font; since the two use different coordinate systems, that's going to cause problems.

I can't see why the printer driver would affect on-screen rendering. Or is there specifically a problem with printouts as well?  You mention this happens only with PSPRINT as compared to LASERJET. Did you try with PSCRIPT?

214
Applications / Re: Web Fonts for OS/2 ?
« on: February 29, 2016, 12:06:11 pm »
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Truetype is the only format that everyone has support for.

Type 1 fonts are arguably more widely supported, if not so ubiquitous, and have existed for longer.

Not absolutely, in an OS/2 installation only Win-OS/2 component provides Truetype-support. Truetype fonts are only added to \psfonts if you install additional language fonts (japanese, etc.). Of course they could be used for PM display but printing is another topic.

I'm not sure what to make of this.  The first two statements may have been true for Warp 3, but since Warp 4 TrueType support has been included in OS/2 out of the box.  And there's nothing to stop them being printed, although quality may suffer unless you use something like PSPRINT.

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Opentype does work after updating the WPS freetype driver, thanks to Alex.
Opentype is not a completely new font format, more another kind of packaging fonts. You're mentioning this software: http://www.altsan.org/programming/os2/#ft2. OpenType works to some degree (only for TT fonts), to cite from Alex's page: "It does not currently support OpenType PostScript fonts..."

That applies to the GA 1.3.x version.  The beta v2.0 version adds support for all OTF fonts.  (It's not on my main website because it is still beta, and has known bugs, but it's on my github and I think on Hobbes.)

215
Applications / Re: Fonts in Lotus Word Pro
« on: February 29, 2016, 04:53:37 am »
Well, for Times at least  you have conflicting versions installed.  I suggest you uninstall the TTF versions of Times New Roman.

216
Applications / Re: Fonts in Lotus Word Pro
« on: February 27, 2016, 03:46:51 am »
The first question to ask is what version of the fonts do you have installed?

Are you using the OS/2 default Type 1 version of Times New Roman?  Or the also-included Win16 TTFs of TNR and Arial?  Or the Microsoft Core Fonts versions of either or both?  Or something else?

Second, does this problem apply on screen, when printed, or both?

217
Applications / Re: Web Fonts for OS/2 ?
« on: February 26, 2016, 04:49:51 pm »
Greggory: the Roboto fonts are nice, as long as you get the fixed & redesigned 2.0 versions instead of the rather half-baked 1.x versions. I normally install them, along with the Droid font series, on my systems. 

Personally, I don't think Workplace Sans is well suited to web page text, although of course it depends on the web page.  It's optimized for UI labels, not paragraph text.  That's one reason I designed Workplace Gothic (which I pulled from my website a couple of years back while I overhauled it; it's almost ready for a reappearance).

Martin: My ALMSWISS.FON is actually very similar to HELV.FON (by design), only in larger sizes.  FWIW, OS/2 doesn't actually require any font besides System Proportional, System VIO, System Monospaced and WarpSans (all of which are built into DSPRES.DLL) in order to run Presentation Manager, although of course some things may look rather ugly without the others. :p  (Also, DBCS versions will face some issues, but that's a whole other tanker of fish.)

218
Hardware / Re: Us vs. The Modern Laptops
« on: February 24, 2016, 03:27:17 pm »
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Any brainstorming is welcome.  What else I'm missing according to what the market is showing on Laptops / Ultranotebooks?

Bluetooth
Hardware function keys (e.g. volume, screen brightness, sometimes including video output) which don't work with ACPI.

219
Hardware / Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« on: February 20, 2016, 01:56:41 pm »
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You're on the right track already. Basically, dig into the job's Postscript output until you find the bit that's causing the problem, and then figure out what the correct code should look like. :p

I only wish I could actually get that far...the crash happens before I can successfully print anything...so literally as soon as I try to print using the HQ1200 setting I am getting a "divide by zero" error.

What actually helped is attempting to print from your handy AE, it produces a pretty descriptive error, while most other apps simply crash. I've attached the screenshot of what that error message actually is. This implies that whatever operation the driver attempts to perform to instantitate the HQ1200 mode produces an error which is then sent back to the program, I assume as an API return code?

AE is not 'mine' in any way.  But in any case, I think that application just means an uninitialized value (or, more probably, a bad address or invalid pointer) somewhere in the PS driver.  Not really meaningful beyond the fact that it crashes.

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I'm now looking at the PAK tools/utilities you made available on your site to understand the details of the AUXPRINT.PAK file. My assumption here is that as PIN imported the PPD with the specific control "codes" to put the printer in HQ1200 mode it either did not convert correctly because it did not know how to do it, or it failed to import altogether (although during the PPD import process no errors are generated).

You can use PPAKTOOL AUXPRINT.PAK /R (or /V) "<printer name>" to dump out the data for that printer as generated by PIN.  If it was imported without corruption, all the values should be shown as the PPD describes them.  If you see stuff that's completely weird (or garbled) then it's a good sign the imported data is corrupt.

You can also use the /P switch to recreate a PPD for the printer out of the PAK file. It won't be exactly the same as the original, but it should have a compatible subset of it. Comparing the two may be instructive (or may not)...

220
Hardware / Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« on: February 16, 2016, 10:22:35 am »
Alright...how the heck does one debug a printer driver? Alex??? lol...what's the "secret sauce" to actually do this with?

You're on the right track already. Basically, dig into the job's Postscript output until you find the bit that's causing the problem, and then figure out what the correct code should look like. :p

221
Hardware / Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« on: February 15, 2016, 12:18:55 pm »
Interesting. I printed a small TXT file using AE to file with word wrap on and off using your PSPrint driver with the default font set. I will attach the file and results which are radically different. Maybe you can make sense of it...

I think AE either does or causes some weird things with the fonts, I was testing here and couldn't get AE to embed the font at all despite.

Regarding the garbled text, it appears that if a TT font is embedded, the character and line advances are all wrong.  It is wrapping the text, it's just that it thinks each character is a fraction of its proper width, and the line is also not advanced when it wraps (or, probably more accurately, it's calculating the line advance as 0).  I can reproduce this, but I have as yet no answer for why it's happening.  It's quite possible I missed implementing some necessary logic somewhere.  You can circumvent the problem by setting the default text font to a Type 1 font like Courier (not New), since the PS font embedding logic appears unaffected.

This seems to be unrelated to the crash you are getting with the super-fine dpi resolution for the Brother printer.  I will note that I have a Brother printer driver (HL-3075), and if I print a text file with resolution set to anything above 600, the page appears blank (although there is no crash). 

222
Hardware / Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« on: February 13, 2016, 01:39:23 pm »
This crash strongly suggests that PIN couldn't cope with the PPD. 

Try printing using the 'Generic Postscript (Enhanced)' model and see if you have better luck.

223
Hardware / Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« on: February 10, 2016, 06:32:01 pm »
Two suggestions... First, print to file and compare the output Postscript file for both the working and non-working scenarios.
Second, try varying the font used for printing text format (printer object properties, tab 'Text Format', font option).

224
Setup & Installation / Re: Problems with fresh yum install
« on: December 30, 2015, 05:50:32 am »
It's not a real error, just a cosmetic bug in yum.  You can safely ignore it.

225
Applications / Re: LVM.DLL and IVM.DLL
« on: November 21, 2015, 02:56:03 pm »
Thanks Andy.

It will be interesting if someone knows the story of what fixed the LVM.DLL against the original IVM.DLL so it can be documented.

It bypasses a couple of checks so that Bootable JFS and Air-BOOT can work seamlessly.

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