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Ask The Guru II

1. a X shown as female DIP socket on motherboard 470 right button 150K Y axis Fig 1 Circuit for the old Apple Game Paddles or Joystick Ne J 46 1 of their DOS manual and then charg ing users 125 for the upgrade Or that the FCC is demanding that all future high definition video dis plays in this country be strictly and absolutely compatible with the obso lete 30 year old NTSC Never The Same Color broadcast video This is exactly the same as asking a consortium of trolley car manufac turers to dictate manditory rules and regulations for all personal vehicles of the nineties Run a stick over the cage bars of these epsilon minuses if you are as appalled over this blatant atrocity as I am Let s see We got Ask the Guru volume I and II in print now along with a Hardware Hacker volume II both published on demand Stuff you just plain will not find elsewhere Along with all the usual PostScript stuff Write or call for info As per usual this is your column and you can get tech help and off the wall networking per the number in the end box Also per usual all of the names and numbers are gathered together at the end of the column Back to some basics How do the Apple Game Paddles Work Figure one shows you both the schematic and connections used for the old 16 pin Apple game paddles while figure two shows you the same for the new 9 pin paddles Joysticks
2. is particularly handy for centering additional graphics or text inside of your drawn box One handy thing about the boxifier is that you can most lock any text or graphics to your box and it can then automatically track for you To do this you use the bl boxleft and the bb boxbottom variables to translate the position of whatever is to go inside A sneaky additional trick is to predefine the box but defer drawing it until after all its contents are com plete You can then redefine bb so it will automatically use up exactly the right amount of space that all its contents may currently demand This gives you perfect text fitting without knowning ahead of time just how many lines you are going to put into the box The bottom of the box will automatically move down with the text provided that you include a redefinition of the bb boxbottom variable that changes with the last line text position On the other hand if you do not need any deferred operation you can simply input all the numeric values before calling boxdraw rather than pre defining all of your variables This is faster and easier for plain old fixed height boxes The brad box radius variable lets you perform all sorts of very sneaky tricks If you do use a large positive value for brad then you will get a box with the usual rounded corners If you do use a brad value that is exactly one half of the box linewidth then you will get
3. samples by calling Randy Bailey at Kroy They also now have lots of sign building accessory kits and some heavier gloss printing stocks But judging from the Perrier in all of their corporate birdbaths Kroy does appear to be a company of by and for Yuppies Low end user cost is not presently in their vocabulary If you do not own a BMW they do not appear to want you as a customer So it might still take a long while before some genuine competition can drive the end user costs down to the nickel per sheet mass market range where they rightfully belong Kroy Kolor is a fantastically great product wherever its sixty cents or so per sheet cost can be justified This product totally revolutionizes what you can do with a copier or a laser printer The sad thing is that it could do so much more if only it were sanely priced for the end user Show me how to Build a Cheap Omnicrom Fuser You do not need 1400 to use either Omnicrom or Kroy Kolor All you need is heat and pressure For instance a plain old iron and a muslin pressing cloth will do the job just fine You can also use those existing fusion rollers inside your laser printer or copier by making a second pass while hand feeding a blank page The process works best with the metallic colors But you might occassionally get a misfeed wrinkles or dropouts A few of the newest copiers are set up to directly use Kroy Kolor One trick that works well and can
4. ASK THE GURU the full macros and the magic of the WPL executive supervisory language No way can they even hold a candle to good old AppleWriter Sigh Let s move on to a question of great import Do People Actually Enter Those Stupid Contests of Yours Sure thing In droves even In fact its gotten so bad that even some of the industrial strength tinajas might have to go on allocation Our latest tinaja quest winner is Bob Smith from up in Colorado He has a paper jogger you can build up from a cheap sander More details on this in a future issue Bob also does advise us that the Xerox thermal transfer material for T shirts is being phased out but that the new Sharp color copiers do offer a similar pro cess and material He along with some other readers feel that the Sublicolor T shirt stuff while workable is based on a very ancient duplicator technology and is insanely overpriced particularly for the ongoing materials and supplies Several contest entrants put me onto what appears to be the best buy in a clamping guillotine style paper cutter This is the Martin Yale Model 7000E which lists for 499 but is dealer priced at 299 in lots of two A sturdier and much more rugged machine is shown in the unusual Kelsey Company catalog while some of highly overpriced also rans appear in the Wolf Camera and the Clark Associates catalogs as well as in the Printing Impressions trade journal It also see
5. cvs cc def colcheck ypos ybot le showpage showpagenumber ypos ytop def if def font1 Bookman Light findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 Bookman Demiltalic findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def font3 Bookman Demi findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def startgonzo Your textfile starts here continues O333here 0331 and ends here 033x showpage Fig 3 A simple just dump the textfile guru template N J best The astounding thing is that the code for the entire WPL language is only several hundred of the tightest written bytes you have ever seen For additional WPL use ideas see the WPL Expansion Kit from Thom pson and Thompson or the various WPL programs in my AppleWriter Cookbook The latter also contains a complete disassembly script that does reveal the innermost WPL workings Where are all Those 1200 PostScript LaserWriters All over the place actually But it does take some patience and some risk to put one together It also does take an awful lot of being in the right place at the right time Here s how this scam works The engines used on an Apple Laser Writer Plus and a Hewlett Packard LaserJet I are nearly identical and you can simply plug a LaserWriter Plus board directly into a LasserJet I Canon CX engine Some additional T O circuitry consisting of a switch and a connector or two is quite easy to throw together out of Radio Shack component
6. print xstrxx exch 0 exch put xstrxx ifelse print stall1 flush forall z r print flush stall def dumparray tarr exch def tarr 0 get trunc 10 string cvs cropzeros print print flush stall tarr 1 get trunc 10 string cvs cropzeros print print flush stall tarr 2 get trunc 10 string cvs cropzeros print print flush stall tarr 3 get trunc 10 string cvs cropzeros print flush stall tarr 4 get dumpstring stall def printfontname dinuse cvx exec length O gt r print flush stall stall dinuse 1 5 getinterval print flush stall r print flush stall if def dinuse dfontx def printgdicts fontsused fxx exch def dinuse 5 fxx put dinuse cvx exec printfontname length 0 gt 0 1 glinenumber dn exch def dinuse cvx exec dn __ cvs cvn known dinuse cvx exec dn cvs cvn get dumparray ifelse for if forall def printgdicts def Fig 4 PostScript gonzo justified text compiler 52 4 ASK THE GURU Va These lines usually go into a persistently downloaded template instead of a header fontO Times Bold findfont 54 0 0 54 0 32 makefont setfont bind def font1 Times Roman findfont 9 75 0 0 9 75 0 0 makefont setfont bind def font2 Times ltalic findfont 9 75 0 0 9 75 0 0 makefont setfont bind def font4 Times Roman findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont bind def z 5 2 roll moveto 0 32 4 2 roll 0 exch awidthshow bind def compile decompacter Here is the actual compiled
7. 135 140 145 150 number of gray 125 levels including black and white 130 for each region 175 6 210 300 0 5 10 Fig 2 The top secret map to those hidden LaserWriter grays 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 Screen angle in degrees P 49 2 ASK THE GURU operations or do any of dozens of other unique higher level tasks that involve word processing It is main ly because of WPL that I still make exclusive use of AppleWriter for all of my desktop publishing and all of my book on demand printing I have yet to find anything anywhere else that even comes remotely close A WPL instruction file is up to 2K characters long and can be made longer using the WPL Expansion Kit To run a WPL program you simply do a P DO MYCOMMANDS WPL or whatever The WPL program gets interpreted a line at a time and then carries out various word processing tasks for you Each instruction line starts either with a label or a space Your next character is interpreted as a control character For instance to go to the beginning of your file your WPL line would be space b The lines will get done in order unless you have a repeat loop or unless a zero value or an unfound search bypasses a com mand line It is amazing how much WPL does with how little One example WPL program would do book on demand printing by first clearing and loading the page files needed to print all of the rea
8. A BL BH CLRBIT BY SETBIT BY A CL CH CLRBIT CY SETBIT CY A DL DH CLRBIT DY SETBIT DY A EL EH CLRBIT EH1 FX SETBIT EL2 FX A FL FH CLRBIT FY SETBIT FY A GL GH CLRBIT GY SETBIT GY CLRBIT SPEED Hang till handshake free Whap speaker once IIgs speed and save Force slow speed get character generate start bit stall for 18 11 7 since 11 are used before Get First Data Bit and pick high low stall for 3 Low if a one stall for 17 14 3 and exit stall 2 High if a zero stall for 17 14 3 and exit Get Second Data Bit and pick high low Low if a one and continue stall 2 High if a zero stall for 18 14 4 Get Third Data Bit and pick high low Low if a one and continue stall 2 High if a zero stall for 18 14 4 Get Fourth Data Bit and pick high low Low if a one and continue High if a zero stall for 18 14 4 Get Fifth Data Bit and pick high low Low if a one stall for 17 14 3 and exit stall 2 High if a zero stall for 17 14 3 and exit Get Sixth Data Bit and pick high low Low if a one and continue stall 2 High if a zero stall for 18 14 4 Get Seventh Data Bit and pick high low Low if a one and continue High if a zero stall for 18 7 11 Begin stop bits get old speed back and restore get old flags back and exit as subroutine Fig 2b A 57600 baud serial driver concluded
9. Data base tabbing use example Y J You also have to select a rule that tells you when to go from column to column While the embedded tab could be used I prefer using this pair of rules Any time you reach two or more sequential spaces then a col umn change should take place And Any two or more spaces in sequence are prohibited inside any single col umn entry The ctab code initially will isolate everything up to the first carriage return and assumes this is one line of data It then takes this line and will search for the first rule that shows the end of the first column The first column entry will then be properly and independently set with the correct offset justification font and width The process continues on a column by column basis until the end of the line It then repeats for each needed line of the entire table As an optional gee whiz feature a half vertical line space can also be provided by including an esc h or 033h in any column of any line This lets you attractively show your data If you are not using my gonzo justify routines then replace cl cc cr or cf with procs that do a suitable left center right or fill justify The txtwide command has to be replaced with whatever is setting your max column width changefont also has to be replaced with whatever is setting your initial font selection for any column Note that most any number of fonts can be mixed in any particul
10. July 1988 f all computer programs were drugs then Hypercard would undoubtedly be the software equivalent of crack Cheaply available on any street corner it is insanely addictive It gives the junkie user a brief and extremely intense euphoria followed by the usual hollow promises and finally ending up with withdrawl symptoms that become crushingly devastating Hypercard also forces continual dosage increases on the user all the while shortening the tolerable time between fixes And finally near the very end extremely grave delusions of adequacy set in At any rate like it or not Hyper card and its imitators are coming soon to a IIc He or a IIgs near you Since forewarned is forearmed you may want to have a long talk with your children as well as starting up your neighborhood action group to try and somehow cope with this societal menance Remember just one single dose and you are hooked for life With no hope of a cure And no Hypercard does not only strike those bad ad dict programmers across the tracks Hypercard relentlessly strikes any where and everywhere without any warning at all cutting across all walks of life Meanwhile Apple has reduced the price of the IIgs Well sort of any way What they really did was bundle up the expansion RAM card in with the IIgs since the new operating system pretty much demands 512K just for itself The part number for the new IIgs system is A2P6024 Oh
11. rescue They have a nifty product called the PC Transporter which is a plug in card for a IIe or IIgs that is an entire American made Hong Kong clone on a card except that it runs three times faster than the real thing There is now a MS DOS drive on my Apple and you simply use a copy command to translate PostScript files or whatever else you care to between the two disk standards I ve only had the beast for a few days but the high quality engineering that went into it is obvious It is even priced less than a stand alone clone would be And the PC Transporter S 1 The per page toner costs are currently as much as 15 times higher than on the earlier LaserWriter printers making the NTX totally useless for serious production work 2 The factory toner is excessively abrasive and the cartridge drums are far too scratch prone Edge shading effects are also unacceptable 3 The lack of user toner refillability on factory stock cartridges is an outright and intolerable atrocity 4 Current Apple black hole service policies demand that you must use Hewlett Packard repair manuals and H P repair parts 5 Any custom serial interface settings get totally trashed if any use at all is ever made of AppleTalk through switch changes 6 The mode changing switches are far too flimsy 7 The lack of any handles makes the NTX extremely easy to drop This is an acute problem for demos lectures and school use 8 The backwards numb
12. 2604 ClipRect 5B04 InvertOval 9204 ObscureCursor c904 GetVisHandle 2704 HidePen 5C04 FillOval 9404 SetFont CA04 InitCursor 2804 ShowPen 5D04 FrameRRect 9504 GetFont CB04 SetBufDims 2904 GetPen 5E04 PaintRRect 9604 GetFontInfo CC04 ForceBufDims 2A04 SetPenState 5F04 EraseRRect 9704 GetFontGlobals CD04 SaveBufDims 2B04 GetPenState 6004 InvertRRect 9804 SetFontFlags CE04 RestoreBufDims 2C04 SetPenSize 6104 FillRRect 9904 GetFontFlags SCF04 GetFGSize 2D04 GetPenSize 6204 FrameArc 9A04 SetTextFace D004 SetFontID 2E04 SetPenMode 6304 PaintArc 9B04 GetTextFace D104 GetFontID 2F04 GetPenMode 6404 EraseArc 9C04 SetTextMode D204 SetTextSize 3004 SetPenPat 6504 InvertArc 9D04 GetTextMode D304 GetTextSize 3104 GetPenPat 6604 FillArc 9E04 SetSpaceExtra D404 SetCharExtra 3204 SetPenMask 6704 NewRgn 9F04 GetSpaceExtra D504 GetCharExtra 3304 GetPenMask 6804 DisposeRgn A004 SetForeColor D604 PPToPort 3404 SetBackPat 6904 CopyRgn A104 GetForeColor D704 InflateTextBuffer 3504 GetBackPat 6A04 SetEmptyRgn A204 SetBackColor D804 GetROMFont 3604 PenNormal 6B04 SetRectRgn A304 GetBackColor D904 GetFontLore 3704 SetSolidPenPat 6C04 RectRgn A404 DrawChar Fig 2 Numeric order list of Ilgs tools part 1 J 40 2 ASK THE GURU slow you down and might severely limit your choice of your host com puter besides costin
13. Ask the Guru Don Lancaster s Ask the Guru Selected reprints volume II Computer Shopper series November 1987 December 1989 Copyright c 1989 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 520 428 4073 Book on Demand self published using the Apple Ile computer and the LaserWriter NTX All graphics were done in their entirety by ProDOS AppleWriter 2 1 Ask the Guru Introduction Hmmm It seems that we somehow made it to Volume II Anyway welcome back to our ongoing series of reprints from my Ask the Guru column originally found in Computer Shopper magazine This volume will begin with column 32 which first appeared in December of 1987 What is this all about Darned if I know Be sure to let me know if you ever find out In theory we are supposed to deal with stuff like Apple Ile computing laser printing PostScript programming and the insider desktop publishing secrets But most anything at all can and will come up As before I go on the assumption that if I am interested enough in something to get involved with it then others like yourself may also be These volumes are also an ongoing experiment in book on demand PostScript laser printing What you have here was literally beat out on a brick in my back yard All of the figures all of the artwork and all of the text was done by using the AppleWriter word processor on an Apple Ile and on demand printed one self c
14. S 50 3 ASK THE GURU tad disjointed and uneven due to the multiple authors Yes I do have these in stock if you want one Speaking of which I do try to keep Adobe s red blue and green books and this orange book in stock along with Apple s new white Laser Writer Reference I have also got autographed copies of my own Ask the Guru volumes I and II my Hardware Hacker volume II and my Incredible Secret Money Machine book available As per usual this is your column and you can get tech help and some off the wall networking per the end box Best calling times are 8 5 week days Mountain Standard Time Also as per usual we ve gathered all of those Names and Numbers to gether at the end of this volume Let s speed things up a tad Show me an honest 57600 Baud Serial Interface I have long been disappointed with the dismal IIgs serial interface firm ware and its software support First the IIgs communicates much slower than the IIe For instance a IIe takes only 6 microseconds to find out if a character is ready to be read That IIgs takes 136 microseconds or so to do the same task in its fast mode Second that IIgs interface is in compatible with pretty near all of the important earlier Ile software so you have to substitute a Super Serial Card instead if you are to reuse many of your older but gooder routines And third we still are lacking essential print drivers for plain
15. These dependencies are apparently a moving target since newer firm ware versions and changes in APW are continually being made Show me a Simple APW And Toolset Example You ve got to be kidding There are no simple APW toolset examples At any rate figure two shows you how to use the APW macros to start up a bunch of the various toolsets get quickdraw in gear next clear the screen to a favorite color and then hang up the machine so that you can view your handiwork This can be the starting point for a program that really does something useful Hint the next step is to open some windows I am personally getting into APW in a big sort of way so let me know what you want to see in the way of additional toolbox secrets Once again APDA short for the Apple Programmers and Developer s Association is where you go to get additional tech info on most Apple and third party products Note that this is a seperate and independent organization that anyone can join and is not related in any way to the Apple registered developer and the certified developer programs Where can I Get Stock Price Histories Obviously from the daily quotes in The Wall Street Journal or else the weekly ones in Barrons In fact out of the 387 plus magazines and other stuff that I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal is my third favorite Right after the Whole Earth Review and of course good old numero uno MAD magazine Stock histor
16. a club supergroup with a fine magazine superb public domain disk releases and great insider tech info long ago got mismanaged by total incompetents that ended up woefully overpricing themselves right out of their market Here s a quick reminder about my 38 1 Hardware Hacker sister column to this one that you will find running in Radio Electronics magazine And yes folks its advetorial time Complete Ask the Guru reprints of most back issues are available as are my brand new PostScript Language Perspective Drawing Utilites and my good old Incredible Secret Money Machine book And now just as soon as we can get that MS DOS user untangled from our stage curtain Is this 1984 or 1988 Funny you should ask that Way back in 1984 when ProDOS was first released it was completely obvious the Ile was a dead machine about to be blasted out of the water by the Apple II And of course if that did not do it Lisa would stomp any of the remaining Ie dregs into absolute nothingness So in a fit of stupendous gener osity ProDOS was designed to last for an ridiculously long four years Enough room was set aside to hold the years 1984 through 1987 inside the code So on midnight December 31st 1987 everybody s ProDOS sys tem backed itself up by four years and started repeating Which isn t quite as bad as some Tandy machines that literally self destructed on that date but still T
17. forall dup 32 eq pop exit ifelse loop dup length 0 gt put glinenumber glinenumber 1 add def 8 pop repeat ifelse if systemdict awidthshow get cvx exec def def createfontdicts divertawidthshow def endgcompile awidthshow systemdict awidthshow get cvx def def reportgcompile cropzeros dup length tslen exch def tslen 1 gt tstring exch def tstring 0 get 48 eq sst 1 def sst 0 def ifelse tstring tslen 2 sub get 46 eq tstring tslen 1 sub get 48 eq and tslen tslen 2 sub def if tstring sst tslen sst sub getinterval if def trunc inum exch def inum dup abs eq minus false def minus true def ifelse inum inum abs def inum 0 000001 It inum O cvi def inum 1000 ge inum 10000 It and inum inum cvi def truncprocs ifelse ifelse inum minus neg if def less1K mult 1 def 8 inum mult mul 1000 gt exit mult mult 10 mul def ifelse repeat inum mult mul 0 1 add round mult div inum exch def def more10K mult 1 def 8 inum mult mul 10000 It exit mult mult 0 1 mul def ifelse repeat inum mult mul round mult div 0 01 add cvi inum exch def def truncprocs inum 1000 It less1K if inum 10000 ge more10K if def xstrxx def printchar xstrxx exch 0 exch put xstrxx print flush stall def stall 20 37 sin pop repeat def stall1 6 37 sin pop repeat def dumpstring print stall flush dup 92 eq 13 print pop 52 if dup 40 eq print if dup 41 eq print if dup 127 gt 8 000 evrs
18. parency negative that has previously been printed on your LaserWriter While some special exposure light boxes are normally used you might instead use a contact printer and a few minutes of strong sunlight The ultra violet light will harden the front of the sheet where the text or images are to appear down to a reasonable depth Next you flip the whole works over and then expose the entire back to harden it You end black write Fig 2 Differences in laser printing engines S white write 34 2 ASK THE GURU up with a giant rubber stamp that has a flat rubbery back and super sharp characters and images on it Finally of course you can mount the resin on a backing and a handle You then use it like any other rubber stamp selecting your ink chemistry and color to suit whatever it is you are printing on A similar material is also being used for the hot new Santa Claus machines that will give you nearly instant three dimensional CAD model prototypes directly off the disk of your Apple or other workstation Needless to say keep me informed on what you are up to with this fan tastic glop The potential here would seem to exceed the Omnicolor and Kroy Kolor materials that we looked at in earlier columns I am firmly convinced there are all kinds of other neat stuff chemicals materials and processes that are now lurking out there just waiting for one of you Computer Shopper read
19. posfig1 save figsnap exch def bl 19 add bb 8 add 11 setgrid clear line1 1810 mt2u212d15 14 mt dot1514mt614d 11 5 14 hresistor 9 6 mt 1d 6165 hresistor 10 6 mt 3d 714 5 5 mt rarrow 4 5 3 mt rarrow 24 14 mt gsave 1 5 dup scale rarrow grestore 24 12 mt gsave 1 5 dup scale rarrow grestore 9 6 mt 6 OUT NC OUT IN IN NC dipdraw line2 23 14 mt816d6r4u2r18 14 mt incadlamp 15 11 mt triac fonti 18 16 3 0331100 watt cc 18 15 5 0331light bulb cc 24 12 8 110 VAC cc 17 5 9 8 2N6154 cc 17 5 9 TRIAC cc 11 6 14 7 220 0333W 0331 cc 6 1 5 7 330 0333W 0331 cc 5 9 MOC 3010 cc 5 8 2 phototriac cc 5 7 4 optocoupler cc 2 7 4 7 5V cr 2 7 2 7 PORT cr font2 yinc 0 8 def 15 5 5 0 O332WARNING Extreme shock hazard on right half of this circuit cl clear figsnap restore llill INCLUDED FIGURE ENDS HERE Mil ACTUAL TEXT STARTS HERE starttext startgonzo 033a S 033b everal helpline callers have now asked me what the main differences are between that 0334BSEET 0331 supertech degree and the 0334BSEE 0331 engineering degrees The quick answer is around one million dollars or so 033p That is roughly how much extra lifetime income the 0334BSEE 0331 degree will garner on the average including the benefits perks retirement plans any investments the other amenities and also allowing for inflation 033p It is no secret that the technicians and supertechs will often do all the work and the engineers
20. 0300 53v which comes from RS232 25 pin 20 0300 54 0300 brie ltars DTR and CD Out from 5 paddle pin 1 0300 56 to RS232 25 pins 6 and 8 0300 57 3 0300 58 Data format is 7 data bits and one stop bit 0300 60 MAGIC NUMBERS 0300 62 One data bit at 57600 baud equals 17 3611 0300 63 microseconds The IIe or slow IIgs has a 0300 64 clock of 3 579545 3 5 65 65 1428 1 020485 0300 65 Mhz corresponding to a period of 0 9799 0300 66 microseconds There are 17 3611 0 9799 17 71 0300 67 clock cycles per baud bit 0300 69 start bit 18 cycles end error 0 29 0300 10 3 bit 1 17 cycles end error 0 42 0300 TL F bit 2 18 cycles end error 0 13 0300 TA ij bit 3 18 cycles end error 0 16 0300 Tai bit 4 18 cycles end error 0 45 0300 74 bit 5 17 cycles end error 0 26 0300 TS op bit 6 18 cycles end error 0 03 0300 Remap bit 7 18 cycles end error 0 32 0300 TB G wate HOOKS SERE 0300 C036 80 SPEED EQU C036 Speed setting byte 0300 co59 81 SETBIT EQU c059 Make output high 0300 c058 82 CLRBIT EQU c058 Make output low 0300 C063 83 BUSY EQU c063 Handshaking input 0300 C030 84 NOISE EQU C030 Click speaker 0300 86 MAIN 57600 CODE 0300 4C 04 03 88 LINK JMP B57600 Bridge over BASIC 0303 FF 89 CHAR DFB SFF Character stash 0304 08 90 B57600 PHP Save status 0305 78 91 SEI No interrupts 0306 2C 58 CO 92 BIT CLRBIT affirm low output 03
21. 0336 0340 033B co 0346 co 0346 0352 034D co 0358 co 0358 0364 035F co 036A co 036A 0378 0371 co 0376 0380 co 037E 0380 038A 0385 co 0390 co 0390 039C 0397 co 03A2 co 03A2 co ASSEMBLY 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 102 103 104 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 1 13 114 115 117 118 LS 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 128 129 130 131 13 2 133 134 135 136 137 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 150 TAF 152 153 154 15 5 156 157 158 199 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 172 173 174 175 I76 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 AX AH AH1 AL AL2 BX BH BH1 BL BL2 BY CX CH CH1 CL CL2 cy DX DH DH1 DL DL2 DY EX EH EH1 EL EL2 FX FH FH1 FL FL2 FY GX GH GH1 GL GL2 GY NO ERRORS BPL BIT LDA PHA AND STA LDA BIT PHA PLA ROR BCC BCS BIT BCS BCS NOP BIT BCC BCC ROR BCC BCS BIT BCS NOP BIT BCC NOP NOP ROR BCC BCS BIT BCS NOP BIT BCC NOP NOP ROR BCC BCS BIT BCS NOP BIT BCC NOP NOP ROR BCC BCS BIT BCS BCS NOP BIT BCC BCC ROR BCC BCS BIT BCS NOP BIT BCC NOP NOP ROR BCC BCS BIT BCS NOP BIT BCC PHA PLA NOP NOP BIT PLA STA PLP RTS HS NOISE SPEED 7F SPEED CHAR SETBIT A AL AH CLRBIT AH1 BX SETBIT AL2 BX
22. 2938 Apple s own publications and tech z 60 385 6 1 041 2 info Those new big machine prod z 60 375 1 2 293 2 ucts from third parties such as the z 60 364 6 9473 2 improved z 152 2 364 6 9473 2 z 71 43 354 1 7139 2 and the great new z 177 354 1 7139 2 graphics z 60 343 6 1 577 2 environment are coming on line and z 60 333 1 1 25 2 making a big splash z 70 322 6 5474 2 On the other hand Apple has been z 60 312 1 2283 2 witholding the Ilgs upgrade and they z 60 301 6 2 5 466 purposely crippled that recent Ilc z 60 291 1 7761 2 upgrade by keeping AppleTalk and a z 60 280 6 1 407 2 real time clock off it And the intro z 60 270 1 0 2 duction of a Mac z 151 5 270 1 0 2 is imminent z 70 259 6 1 147 2 As see it there is only one fatal z 60 249 1 002357 2 flaw in the IIgs And that lies in all of z 60 238 6 1 136 2 the monumental costs the incredible z 60 228 1 2 102 2 time delays rude surprises and the z 230 627 1 3051 2 inexcusable frustration levels that are z 230 616 6 2 5 2693 involved in that z 326 5 616 6 2 5 2693 development z 230 606 1 6595 2 environment If you have to go to all z 230 595 6 5284 2 that innane nonsense then you might z 230 585 1 1 197 2 as well be doing it all on a Mac At z 230 574 6 1 141 2 present any serious IIgs commercial z 230 564 1 13 2 software development appears to be a z 230 553 6 1 319 2 sucker bet because of the sheer frus z 230 543 1 1
23. Arizona on June 2 4 This is a combined Apple II Macintosh and Desktop Publishing gathering and one of the best ones anywhere This year s show should be longer and larger than before Seminars demos and hands on sessions will be given by Guy Kawasaki and Peter Sandys of Apple Tom Weishaar of A2 Central Roger Wagner of Roger Wagner Publishing Bill Mensch of Western Design Center and bunches of similar name brand people I will have a booth there and will be holding several hands on seminars on PostScript fundamentals and on desktop publishing Bee will also be giving a seminar or two on book on demand publishing and on high tech opportunities for you working artists Yes a pre or post show tinaja quest or two could also be arranged Plans are also underfoot for a new supergroup regional user group meet ing and for several special assembly language conferences There will also be a MicroSoft night and several pups from Beagle Brothers will also be on hand The cost of all of the seminars and the exhibits will be around 20 for the whole show There will be all the usual freebies prizes and giveaways as well Rooms are now available at the special and lower Safari summer rates Since there is a major car race on the same weekend early arrange ments are a good idea The Sun Remarketing people have apparently lied to me twice over the phone causing some serious mis information to appear in this column Because o
24. In our upcoming October column we will be seeing just how you can go to an upgraded and very sop histicated three stage progressive gonzo fill justify including such features as a minimum auto kerning hanging punctuation drop caps and lots of similar goodies But let s assume that you are still using Ragemaker or something sim ilar that has at its best some sadly mediocre fill justify routines What can you do to improve your final text appearance Just this After all of your final fill justified text is in its final form on the final page you go back and let the original author individually and by hand adjust each and every one of the printed lines for the very best of possible aesthetics Paragraph five of corollary three of Swampfelder s seventh law of printing legibility states that any pretty text is much more readable and much more retainable than any correct text By purposely making all your text slightly wordy and purposely chosing less than the perfect word in each position in each sentence you might dramatically improve both the reader enjoyment and comprehension pro vided you do improve the black balance and minimize any space ticity of the layout in the process aiming for the smoothest and densest visual result So how do you go about doing post justification editing Obviously you start with a decent hyphenation routine And then you manually override that routine any time it
25. LaserWriter NT or NTX One source of recoating drums and services is Arlin Shepard of Lazer Products Projected recoating costs are in the 8 range It will be very interesting to see how effective drum recoating eventually becomes Let s go back to the old stuff The best source for detailed maintenence May 1989 and repair manuals on the CX and SX engines is Hewlett Packard In fact it is pretty near impossible to intel ligently use any Apple LaserWriter without owning the related HP man ual that will cover it The older CX engine LaserJet LaserWriter Laser Writer Plus manual is 02686 90904 while the newer SX engine LaserJet II LaserWriter NT and NTX manual is part number 33440 90904 HP has traditionally been a great source for repair and replacement parts for the Apple machines but lately they have been going to selling the major assemblies only If the part you want is not individually available from HP try Custom Technology or Thompson and Thompson As I ve mentioned a time or two before there are two reloading meth ods the punch and go and the total teardown I overwhelmingly prefer punch and go since it delivers far and persist true def persist serverdict begin 0 exitserver if printerror brkpage 64 dict def brkpage begin prnt dup type stringtype ne string cvs if dup length 6 mul tx exch def ty 10 def currentpoint toy exch def tox exch def 1 setgray newpath tox toy 2 sub moveto 0 t
26. PostScript LaserWriter Plus Update SUPP01 PostScript Linotron 100 v42 Update SUPP02 PostScript QMS PS800 Update SUPP03 PostScript DEC VAX SUN and UNIX Update SUPP04 PostScript Agfa P400PS Update SUPP05 PostScript Tl OmniLaser 2115 Update SUPP06 PostScript NEC LC 890 Update SUPP07 Note on Flow Control and Serial Communication COMM01 LaserWriter Serial I O Patch COMM02 Developer Tools Diskette DEV01 LaserWriter Plus AFM Files DATA 01 PPD Printer Description Files PPDF01 Fig 1 Adobe Systems tech literature on PostScript S 41 1 ASK THE GURU You ll want to work upside down to keep chips out of the toner filling tank but that Unibit will instantly give you a clean hole Use a slow drilling speed And you can now plug up the hole with a plain old nickel Caplug that is available from the Caplug people or their Alliance Plastics competitors You might want to press your fast forward button because it is now bleep advertorial time Complete sets of the Ask the Guru reprints do remain available as do my various PostScript products including that Introduction to Postscript Video the PostScript Show and Tell and the pre release on my brand new Don Lancaster s PostScript Secrets book and disk combo Yes we also stock the new Adobe green book on Post Script program design Let us start off with an obscure history lesson Tell me all About The LAN of The E
27. Seagate Technology had recently overexpanded a tad and the institu tions have all pressed their collective panic buttons An instutitional invest or would now rather carry AIDS than SGAT Buy at 8 sell at 18 There have been a dozen minor corrections to the gonzo justify we looked at last month I ve also now added custom kerning tabs and an improved compile to the routines NS 13 ANNOUNCIATOR 2 ANNOUNCIATOR 3 12 A TTL or CMOS digital logic A TTL or CMOS digital logic output settable or resettable output settable or resettable by bit testing Can be used by bit testing Can be used for custom control outputs for custom control outputs 14 ANNOUNCIATOR 1 GAME PADDLE 3 11 A TTL or CMOS digital logic Expects a 10K to 150K output settable or resettable variable resistor to 5vdc by bit testing Can be used for paddle or joystick for custom control outputs operation Second user 115 ANNOUNCIATOR 0 GAME PADDLE 1 10 A TTL or CMOS digital logic Expects a 10K to 150K output settable or resettable variable resistor to 5vdc by bit testing Can be used for paddle or joystick for custom control outputs operation First user 16 NO CONNECTION NO CONNECTION 9 Do not use Do not use shown as female DIP socket on motherboard 1 5 VDC SUPPLY A limited amount of 5vdc pushbutton announciator supply current is available and strobe return path Any her
28. Some early files may later get overwritten If the block data takes a right angle turn in the middle or if later key blocks usurp the same data blocks Tim amp Linda Boyd tinajas quested 629 Quacker Way Alkalai VT 02999 121 842 9989 Quacker Hillside Milton Road Fig 4 A typical personal map business card 41 4 then the file is no longer used The object of all this should be a list of the files you want to recover Should one block be blown up in the middle of a file replace that block number in the key block with the previous block number This way you will get 512 good but repeat bytes replacing any bad block If the catalog fixer did not work you ll have to manually patch a new catalog to link what you have with what you want So init a new disk and create dummy files AAA through ZZZ on it Then very carefully copy track zero and only track zero from this new disk to the backup Reread block two of the backup Your new catalog should be there Then consulting figure two or one of the ProDOS books manually patch each catalog entry as needed In general you will have to patch byte 00 of a directory entry with the storage type and byte 10 with the file type to be recovered Bytes 11 and 12 get filled with the block number of the recovery key block Values go in place low byte first as is typical with 6502 code You will also have to patch 13
29. Then they have the utter arro gance to suggest that Apple Writer is not useful on the IIgs when in fact it is far and away the finest word pro cessor available for use on the IIgs today We have seen the simple three byte patch needed right here in our earlier ATG columns Over the past year this patch has beeen widely dis tributed as have many other Apple Writer improvements Finally the only useful Postscript resources they cover are the red and blue books Our free PostScript BBS and free help line is not mentioned nor are any of several others The Tech Tidbits idea does seem sound if only they can get their act cleaned up Time will tell The Letraset people have recently introduced some great new desktop publishing tools and materials Un fortunately their sales department was so snotty to me that I have com pletely forgotten what these products are or where to get them PostScript is rapidly going for all of the marbles Besides its use as a standard page description language and as a newly emerging standard screen description language look for PostScript facsimile replacements the BBS graphics exchange formats all the PostScript engraving and sign 35 1 making machines and even some new PostScript software you can use for printed circuit layouts I will throw in the usual reminders that my hardware hacker column has recently been moved over to Radio Electronics magazine and that
30. Use the stopwatch features of my nuisance dictionary shown in Ask The Guru II Note that the balance between execution and comm time is a continuously moving target that changes with your programming style and your choice of baud rate and engine 8 Eliminate all or nearly all unneeded comments spaces or pretty printing from your runtime files Use the shortest possible variable names 9 Try to become just barely baud rate limited Typically most of your code will be execution time limited and should get compiled or else pseudo compiled for a speedup Should some code actually baud rate limit go the other way and let the printer use fancier and slower PostScript sequences to shorten your transmitted files 10 Compile slow portions of your PostScript code by eliminating any calculations For instance the positioning and justification of fancy text needs only be done once during a compiling step Return the compiled results to your host for recording During runtime use only fixed constants for positioning and stretching of text 11 Rearrange your print time files so that the all of the main text is printed first followed by all italic text followed by all bold text and so on so that each needed font only gets selected once and only once 12 Use other compiling tricks when and where appropriate such as the converting of pixel line remapped images into scanmap files 13 Avoid compiling anything that makes your runtime textfi
31. What s Wrong With the NTX Well I have had my LaserWriter NTX for eight months now and I do suppose it is time to tell you what is wrong with it I have now thoroughly tested it out on a twelve hour per day basis doing all my columns walk in typesetting ad materials my internal forms and even attempting book on demand publishing with it First and foremost the Canon SX engine is far and away the finest and most popular low end laser printing engine And the NTX is the finest SX PostScript implementation available la N American Printer Graphic International Print Equipment News 300 West Adams PO Box 4639 Box 5540 Chicago IL 60606 Pompano Beach FL 33063 Glendale CA 91201 312 726 2802 305 971 4360 818 954 9495 Business Forms amp Systems High Volume Printing The Printers Shopper 401 North Broad Street Box 368 PO Drawer 1056 Philadelphia PA 19108 Northbrook IL 60062 Chula Vista CA 92012 215 238 5300 312 564 5940 800 854 2911 Canadian Printer amp Publisher Image World RIT Printing Impressions 777 Bay Street One Lomb Memorial Drive 401 North Broad Street Toronto ONT M5W 1A7 Rochester NY 14623 Philadelphia PA 19108 416 596 5781 716 475 2549 215 238 5300 Colophon In Plant Printer Printing Journal 1585 Charleston Road Box 368 Box 5515 Mountain View CA 94039 Northbrook IL 60062 Pasadena CA 91107 800 833 6687 312 564 5940 818 793 7901 Direct Image Corp In Plant Reproductions Pr
32. What are the Options to Stock AppleTalk Cables If you are going to believe Apple cabling that lists for 150 must be bought to use AppleTalk at all and you absolutely must use AppleTalk in order to use the LaserWriter Both of these concepts are outright myths There are at least five different ways of beating the 150 AppleTalk access tab The first and cheapest is to not use AppleTalk at all since it can slow you down and can very severely limit your choice of host machines and output devices In the case of a LaserWriter a serial A B box often works just fine and is far more flexible Your second option is to build your own cables following the easy schematic we looked at last month The folks over at Redmond Cable can supply you with the connectors Your third option is to substitute unused telephone lines for all the expensive cables In the long run the only successful local area networks must use existing telephone cables anything else will automatically price itself out of its market At any rate there s an outfit called Farallon Computing that will be very happy to sell you alternatives to the stock AppleTalk that use ordinary phone line or other twisted pair and that cost far less than the original If you only have one computer connected to one printer that both share the same grounded AC power outlet then you do not need anything fancy at all in the way of an AppleTalk connector All you ll reall
33. and 14 with the total number of blocks used in the recovery file For the next step you ll have to calculate the exact file length of the file to be recovered and put it in 15 low 16 mid and 17 high Finally attempt to read your AAA entry and see if it actually loads your recovered file If it does immediately transfer this recovered file to a clean disk Then rename the file This process really sounds hairy but if you pick up the needed books and tools and practice it bunches ahead of time disk recovery can be made into a non gruesome process Show me More of The Main IIgs Tool List As we found out last month a complete listing of the IIgs tools in numeric order is quite hard to find yet is extremely useful for analyzing other people s IIgs code Our second installment appears in figure three Please Help me Cut Some Corners Sure thing As we learned before there is a never ending assortment of overpriced and hard to get tools that can make desktop publishing and its laser printing ridiculously more powerful and more useful Stuff like joggers folders laminators drilling machines padding presses fusers guillotine cutters binders and so on At any rate the chances are you might like to round off the corners of such things as bumperstickers ship ping labels punched card coupons VHS cassette labels peel and stick stuff point of purchase signs menus or just about whateve
34. and 40 column from the control panel and get into graphics and HIRES Then do a read or a write to hex location C05E otherwise known as a PEEK 49246 To get the color back just read or write to location C05F or else do a PEEK 49247 Or to get more technical to get into this mode whap soft switches C050 C057 C00C and C05E Then set bit 5 in C029 by loading C029 then ORing it immediate with 20 and then resaving it to C029 There s a similar 80 column color fringeless mode you can get into by whapping the 80 column soft switch This has to be done inside a program rather than directly from the monitor The result can be a most dramatic improvement in monochrome HIRES displays You still cannot have a full color HIRES image with black and white mixed text below though Show Me An Integer Square Root Routine I get lots of calls for fancy math routines usable from Apple machine language Probably the best way to handle most of this today is with the SANE numerics Standard Apple Nu meric Environment which give you nearly all of the high precision math and trig functions Yov ll find SANE all ready to go in both the IIgs and the Mac tool boxes You can also get disk based SANE assembly language routines for older Apples from A P D A These routines are not particularly fast but they do the job and do it well 16 bit integer square root code An accurate and astonishingly fast only 38
35. at some point in your text In general some things should be compiled and some should not For instance the present code does not keep track of saves or translates or any wholesale font changes When all compiling is completed and usually at the exit point of your document you activate reportgcom pile This reads the font dictionaries June 1989 240 480 1 1388 2 Actually if you think about it for a z 230 469 6 1 573 2 while the day of the custom operat z 230 459 1 4004 2 ing system is nearing an end Instead z 230 448 6 2462 2 you just take lots of z 336 1 448 6 2462 2 and a z 230 438 1 1 472 2 chip that s running like a bat out of z 230 427 6 1 407 2 Cupertino and then provide suitable z 230 417 1 1 227 2 firmware microcode that temporarily z 230 406 6 1 619 2 downgrades it into your choice of a z 253 5 396 1 7952 2 a z 291 396 1 7952 2 or a z 340 5 396 1 7952 2 And then z 230 385 6 7849 2 runs anything by anybody Real time z 230 375 1 1 25 2 or even faster z 240 364 6 2 5 2194 Similarly disk drives are getting z 230 354 1 1 471 2 smarter and more flexible A multi z 230 343 6 1 407 2 sync drive that can accept any past z 230 333 1 3217 2 or present media shouldn t be all that z 230 322 6 2 5 2611 far away Interestingly enough the z 230 312 1 2 5 3839 new z 280 2 312 1 2 5 3839 operating system does z 230 301 6 1 244 2 include a z 288 5 301 6 1 244 2 or z 250
36. chine for the top twenty entries and an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest to the very best Give me an Update On Toner Cartridge Refilling As we ve seen many times before those toner cartridges used on the Canon CX and SX laser printers are easily refillable And the latest of third party toner refills are now both super black and super cheap Which completely turns around both laser printing economics and appearance For instance a stock CX cartridge refill currently costs as much as 125 and is only good for 2500 copies That is a nickel per page just for toner On the other hand if you buy an empty but not previously refilled cartridge out of your sunday paper it will cost you 5 in large towns and 10 in a smaller one With care you can refill this used cartridge five times with toner refills priced as little as 7 50 each Which costs out to only 1 3rd of a cent per page That s less than jiffy printing and only 1 15th the cost of always doing things their way In fact there is no point in ever buying a new CX cartridge since the cartridge does not even start to get properly conditioned until 3000 cop ies or so and since you might as well have somebody else use up all that grayish original toner for you The best source for refill supplies that I have found is Arlin Shepard over at Lazer Products in Colorado And an independent toner testing and evaluation service is now availab
37. computers one of which does have a full video and EPROM burning capa bility To this day there is no finer computer to teach the fundamentals of machine language programming I personally feel that the KIM 1 was the last decent computer that Com modore ever built and sure would like to see it reissued Finally since my personal com puter collection is so skimpy I am building up some of my own These do include a little battery powered 50 control computer using that great Mitsibushi M50734 The M50734 is a latter day 6502 that does include such built in goodies as 40 I O lines 257 accumulators four A D converters two stepper motor drivers a watch dog circuit four timers a UART a pulse position modulator and a soft ice cream dispenser What s the Difference Between the old and new IIe and IIgs Game Paddle Connectors The original Apple II and II had a game paddle connector that consisted of an ordinary 16 pin DIP socket on the motherboard Which had the dual disadvantages of the game paddle or joystick pins that were really easy to break and that you had to remove the lid of your Apple every time that you wanted to plug or unplug your pad dles or joystick The full sixteen pins did give you four game paddles or two joystick inputs three pushbutton inputs four announciator outputs and a strobe output signal A secret fourth push button input was available if you did look around for it hard enough Hint
38. fatter10 gs 10 def Iw 5 def drawlines if grestore if def fat5 true def fatter10 true def seegrid true def 0 0 10 setgrid 60 78 showgrid clear rubbersnap restore 135 25 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen 0 99 setgray erasebox gsave currentpoint yc exch 1 5 sub def xc exch 1 sub def xc yc moveto 0 9 rlineto 15 0 rlineto 0 9 rlineto closepath 1 setgray fill grestore def Helvetica Bold findfont 8 scalefont setfont numberow numnum exch def numpos exch def xrun 43 def 9 xrun numpos moveto erasebox numnum show xrun xrun 100 add def repeat def 97 100 numberow 197 200 numberow 297 300 numberow 397 400 numberow 497 500 numberow 597 600 numberow 697 700 numberow 90 rotate 103 100 numberow 203 200 numberow 303 300 numberow 403 400 numberow 503 500 numberow 90 rotate 406 725 moveto 20 setlinewidth 180 0 rlineto stroke 1 setgray Helvetica Bold findfont 13 scalefont setfont 410 721 moveto Normal Grid 0 0 translate show showpage Fig 5 Postscript code for the standard point grid S 36 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU March 1988 pparently the powers that be at Apple Computer have belatedly discovered that by far the most absurdly ludicrous words ever to be uttered by mankind are See your local Apple dealer for technical assistance At long last Apple is now making a really major commitment to improv ing and upgrading their end u
39. here we go one more time The open apple key is the very same as game paddle or joystick button 1 The closed apple key is the same as game paddle or joystick button 2 To read the open apple key you do a OAKEY PEEK 16287 To read the closed apple key you might instead perform a CAKEY PEEK 16286 If either result ends up greater than 128 that key is down December 1987 The equivalent machine language locations are hexadecimal C061 for the open apple key and C062 for the closed apple key How can I Print Directly Onto Fabric You would do this the same way you would print on a box on the side of a wall or onto your ex girlfriend Naturally you can start out by using Applewriter on a Ile or IIgs driving a LaserWriter to create your original 1 1 art Then what I have found yet another astonish ingly magical material that has been scunging away for many years on the back shelf of some rather obscure distributors The whole product line is called Merigraph and it is made in bulk by Hercules and is stocked in small quantities by R A Stewart The basic product is an ultra violet curing liquid resin It is ideal for making all your own printing plates and rubber stamps With the Laser Writer of course you are no longer limited to text only stamps nor is there any reasonable upper size limit What you do is pour out a thin layer of this glop and then expose it to ultra violet light through a trans
40. me pricing or data on any of them A dozen more never returned calls Naturally the manufacturers tell me to see my dealer My dealer is usually 1500 miles away and does not answer his phone I do not think he even knows how Or else his mother won t let him Now here s what we need for the new desktop publishing revolution A manual fourteen inch self clamping paper cutter with a backstop that can handle half an inch of paper at a time Is that too much to ask I can even see paying several hundred dollars for this but I most certainly can not see paying 800 particularly when a totally worthless epsilon mi nus of a salesperson is going to rip off 320 of that And especially since that 800 pricing was purposely made just predatory enough to try and step you up to a motorized unit Well there s one fairly low priced clamping cutter that I have found This is the Dahle model 115 I got one at our local Price Club for under 40 But there are two major pro blems with this turkey First there is zero mechanical advantage to the clamp You have to push down on it and what you push is what you get in the way of holding power Second the Dahle people proudly proclaim that their cutter never will need sharpening What they really mean is that their cutter is categor ically impossible to sharpen because the blade is welded in place After a few months of use the two blades end up chewing great gaping holes i
41. paragraph Undecipherable technical gibberish But both Lexie and Cassie really seem to like their pillows You might just want to build up some favorite Pellon alphabets and number sets all ready for future use Thanks to your laser printing lots of different sizes and styles are easily done Any way you like Use a bigger point size than you think you will need Remember that points are measured from the top of a capital W down to the bottom of the lower case g descender Oh yeah One extremely important point There are two different types of Pellon There s the plain or sew in type and the bondable or heat fusable type that is intended to be ironed in place Obviously you want to use the plain or sew in type The heat fusable Pellon ends up a total disaster if it ever hits the heat fusion rollers on your laser printer One more time Be sure to use the plain Pellon Do not ever use the heat fusable or iron on type But why don t you tell me instead For the first of our two contests this month just dream up an off the wall va Then do a drawspiro mul sub def 200 300 translate 1 setlinewidth showpage demo remove before use N Copyright c 1989 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All commercial rights reserved Personal use is permitted so long as this header remains both present and intact A work in progress disk for
42. printing of blank pages by using a copies 6 def showpage open your lower exit tray and make a mark at the previous page edge position at the instant the next page starts its feed On the Apple Ile using modified AppleWriter with an internal 57600 baud serial driver this compiled test file does in fact print at the full speed with zero apparent page makeready How well does your computer do 52 7
43. prolog to your text Then insert the gonzo begin startgonzo command in turn followed by your text The text can be from most any program on any computer To break out of your gonzojustify use an fescape X or an 033X followed by a showpage Figure four does show you the template that I am now using for all the book on demand published Hard ware Hacker reprints volume II This gives you a three column fill justified page layout that includes seperate treatments of title pages left pages and the right pages That text automatically flows around figures that can be inserted in any of twelve locations and three widths The figures themselves can be in one of three standard forms intended for the electronic schematics normal listings and compact listings Other wise any old PostScript code can be used for the figures Any extra text at the end will get automatically lopped off without any errors getting produced The main text makes use of a dozen different fonts There is that drop cap font regular sized text in plain italic and a bold a slightly reduced text for all caps again in plain italic and a bold a special drop centered and bold font for titles and Symbol and Zapf for special effects Additional and seperate font selections are used for your header footers and for each of the three illustration styles The border and the title of each illustration can also be selectively turned off and on A unique
44. sampler listing that can get you started while figure five shows you a portion of the layout of a simple and sensitive 10 bit A D converter that plugs directly into your Apple Ie or IIgs game paddle port More details on this gem appear in my Hardware Hacker column that appears over in Radio Electronics magazine The full blown utilities consist of three parts A prolog contains the hundreds of available custom Post Script layout commands A print instructions header then selects the scale the reversals the page position for larger printouts and so on And finally your own script contains a listing of the pads and traces There is a limit to the total path length used in any PostScript routine So rather than defining a single seperate path for the grid component side foil side and overlay callouts these are allowed to be arbitrarily long and complex In the complete utilities package the print instruc tions header then picks either the page or the nulldevice for each layer Anything printed to the nulldevice ends up intentionally missing on the chosen final artwork copies Ordinary polyester mylar over head transparency material seems to work just fine for most hacker and low end circuit layouts Let me know if you have any further interest in pc layout stuff It sure is fun to play with and it does outperform several very costly soft ware packages 40 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU
45. the books are given a trim with a guillotine paper cutter This gives a professional final edge Naturally Id be most happy to send you a sample copy of all this at the going rate Do write or call if you are at all interested So What is Next The next really big step in the self publishing process is publishing on demand At the press of a button out should pop one complete and personally customized book copy Ilgs video out DB15 male red video G composite sync O green video ground _ _ blue video Fig 2 Ilgs video cable for the Magnivox RGB 80 S RGB 80 analog video in DIN 6 male 37 2 ASK THE GURU All collated and ready for binding Fully unattended except possibly for a page flipover halfway through To do this will require a dramatic speedup in the PostScript processing and communicating time By use of all my compiling utilities I can now print a three column ten font two illustration plus header sheet using a mere 14 seconds of pre print proces sing time By going out the IIgs game paddle port at 57600 baud I should be able to communicate well over 7 times faster than AppleTalk can A hard disk can further speed up the WPL access of all the individual page files And I should have a new LaserWriter accellerator on hand real soon now An intermediate objective of 12 seconds per printed page should be reachable This would translate to
46. the outhouse alone Very interestingly though there is a hidden two word subliminal mess age buried in the software licensing agreement Most potential users can clearly receive this message from ten feet away in two seconds flat What is the Pellon Ploy Hmmm Whaddaya know If you scrape the bottom of the barrel long enough you will find a secret hidden compartment chock full of goodies As most of you are aware we ve looked at dozens of different magic April 1989 materials and processes that greatly extend the possibilities and oppor tunities of laser printing Among others we have looked at printing on aluminum creating giant rubber stamps doing self numbering tickets specialty papers glow in the dark bumperstickers the Kroy Kolor process transparent materials those magic Coburn materials the instant transfer decals and even replicating three dimensional objects in ultra violet curable plastics Full details appeared in the back issues and in my Ask the Guru I and Ask the Guru II At any rate Pellon is a non woven fabric you will find at your cloth or notions store It costs a dollar a yard and sometimes goes by its generic name of non woven interfacing You will find several weights available Believe it or not the Pellon can be safely run through your LaserWriter or other laser printer You do have to manually feed it and carefully pre cut your Pellon to exactly 8 1 2 by 11 before you at
47. 100 drawapple gsave 150 80 translate 10 0 0 moveto 30 drawapple 40 0 ASK THE GURU a N Ws yA the z7 E 2 Ie UR a WG ORCL aal ee WN Oe oo Fig 7 Another yawn AppleWriter text file Ne D and arcs You can now even do an animated flyby changing both your position and viewpoint with a very few keystrokes Individual objects can also all be seperately rotated What I would like to do here is share with you all of the fundamental perspective transformations Chances are you can apply all these to most any old graphics program on most any computer even using plain old HIRES out of Applesloth And it sure is fascinating to fly over a building with nothing but a couple of key strokes Only simple high school math is involved The perspective most people use most often is known as two point perspective in which all vertical lines stay that way The simpler one point perspective that you would get while looking down a long hallway is just a special and centered case of this two point perspective At any rate figures four and five show you both of the transformations as needed to convert a three dimen sional object into a two dimensional 38 5 representation on a sheet of paper or your computer s display screen
48. 25 2 tration problems involving z 366 2 543 1 1 25 2 z 240 532 6 2 5 2123 The long term handwriting is on z 230 522 1 3816 2 the wall Apple now has a secret new z 230 511 6 1 806 2 machine in the works known as the z 299 3 501 1 1 531 2 that runs both Mac z 230 490 6 1 25 2 and Ilgs software side by side z Fig 5a Incredibly fast compiled PostScript text example N 52 5 because of the onion effect with its Hi How are the wife and your kids handshaking overhead Before you blindly use AppleTalk be sure and compare it against an honest 57600 baud comm direct channel to find out how severe your AppleTalk speed penalty will be Regardless of how you communi cate be sure to measure the de facto click to clunk transmission times You are certain to find bunches of rude surprises along the way Once you have gotten the fastest possible transmission times the next obvious rule is to never send any thing over the channel that does not need to be sent Persistent downloads of such things as justification and drawing routines templates and so on are usually a very good idea It is usually far better to fill your printer with needed routines once in the morning rather than towing along individual and identical routines with each textfile If you definitely know that you will want to reprint your file three or more times in the future then you can take some additional compiling cal
49. 291 1 1279 2 code that in theory will let you z 230 280 6 1 483 2 read from or to any disk file in any z 230 270 1 1 25 2 format crossing any boundary z 240 259 6 2 294 2 Oh yeah There is a stupidity on z 230 249 1 9998 2 the new Ilgs version z 362 249 1 9998 2 oper z 230 238 6 2 153 2 ating system that is driving all you z 230 228 1 2 5 3155 newcomers up the wall At a first z 400 627 1 2 5 2095 glance it appears as if there is no z 400 616 6 2 5 4451 support whatsoever for z 531 3 616 6 2 5 4451 inch z 400 606 1 2 5 4777 disk drives in this new operating z 400 595 6 2 5 3329 system Actually the needed z 400 585 1 2 213 2 drivers are buried in a subdirectory z 400 574 6 2 406 2 named z 515 3 Brg csbies Compiled PostScript text example continued S 400 564 1 1 791 2 of the drivers have to be moved up z 52 6 400 553 6 1 25 2 into z 538 5 553 6 1 25 2 z 410 543 1 3153 2 Full tech details on z ASK THE GURU in sequential order and returns only the absolute minimum of information needed to put each message exactly where it belongs on the final page Your host must be able to record all this returned information into a suitable textfile AppleWriter s Q I esc R modem works well here Figure five shows you a sample of the actual compiled text returned to the host for recording The code gets slightly compacted by dropping any trailing spaces by rounding to fou
50. 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU March 1989 ust for kicks try to calculate the effective baud rate of a single half gigabyte CD ROM disk that will get mailed once a month Figure around ten of your baud bits per byte The answer is rather scary and has profound implications for the entire future of data communications Speaking of communications be sure to get yourself a copy of Signal from the Whole Earth Review This 17 volume in the style and flavor of the original Whole Earth Catalog has a wide variety of comm resources in it ranging the gamut from desktop publishing to interspecies communi cation This one is in the must have category Try your local bookstore The Infocom folks have lowered prices on many of their classic text only adventures down into the 14 range They also have a free and full color Escape magazine that has now replaced their older Status Line Uh I hate to ask this but I can t get past zapping the green emerald in Trinity and New Mexico is nowhere in sight For a free Incredible Secret Money Machine book how about you giving me a hint or two There s lots of exciting laser stuff happening Intel has improved the process of modulating the size of laser printing dots and their visual edge products can now dramatically improve the halftoning process You can now do a 100 line halftone on a 300 DPI printer and still have 37 gray levels This means that you can now
51. 532 6 1 25 2 APDA z 464 7 522 1 2 5 3108 Hewlett Packard z 400 196 6 2 235 2 Diablo z 470 1 196 6 2 235 2 LaserJet z 498 165 1 8286 2 Synergetics z 459 2 123 1 1 79 2 Ask the Guru z 400 102 1 1 424 2 Hardware Hacker z 436 6 70 6 1 25 2 Work in Progress z font4 87 51 543 1 6003 2 IBM XT z 152 7 354 1 7139 2 GEOS z 132 2 270 1 0 2 K 12 z 305 7 616 6 2 5 2693 APW z 345 6 543 1 1 25 2 APW z 315 448 6 2462 2 RAM z 364 448 6 2462 2 RISC z 230 396 1 7952 2 80386 z 267 5 396 1 7952 2 65832 z 317 396 1 7952 2 68030 z 252 7 312 1 2 5 3839 GS OS z 272 4 301 6 1 244 2 FST z 320 249 1 9998 2 4 0 z 335 5 249 1 9998 2 GS OS z 510 1 616 6 2 5 4451 5 1 4 z 534 5 595 6 2 5 3329 5 1 4 z 432 574 6 2 406 2 TOOL DIRECTORY z 492 4 543 1 3153 2 GS OS z 539 9 459 1 7343 2 H P z 471 8 406 6 2 272 2 IIl z 512 6 396 1 2 5 4509 CD z 517 8 280 6 1 618 2 CD ROM z showpage 410 60 1 1 627 2 As per usual this is your column z 400 217 6 2 5 3555 LaserWriter Reference Manual z 419 9 553 6 1 25 2 SYSTEM SYSTEM DRIVER z Fig 5c Compiled PostScript text example concluded the space the 0 for the y character stretch and the 0 for the y space stretch As shown at the beginning of figure five all of the needed decom pacting can be quickly done with a few simple and extremely efficient stack manipulations Yes your compiled text will get longer by twenty to forty percent compa
52. 69 61 13 69 0 18 0017 71 0 73 0 12 74 0 11 75 0 10 76 09 77 0 8 78 80 0 6 81 0 def Here s one way to show a vertical scanmap 100 200 translate 10 dup scale Rscanmap drawvlinemap Both normal and greatly magnified results are shown above Note that there is a 512 element array limit when using the stack to create the array Use several arrays or else put to create arrays of 65530 elements or less Scanmaps are usually more compact than bitmaps Fig 4 Converting a PostScript font to a scanmap N Te wie ESE E 6 ES Aa FN L 80 54055805 9 0 81 00 8S AL 0 i R 48 4 have a profound effect in the user acceptability of any desktop publis hed product especially if it is bound If a book or bound whatever looks a tad on the skimpy side it will not feel right Upgrading a weight or two on the paper might dramatically improve user acceptance On the other hand if you do reach the thickness limits of your binding system or if things get too fat then using a lower bulk or a thinner paper will once again get you back into the acceptable range There are obvious limits of course Too thick a paper and the costs go up and the feeding becomes a problem Too thin a paper and you ll get print through and an overall skimpiness Tell Me all about The Colorease Process Colorease is a new way to convert any toner image into instant trans fers of multiple color real ink that can end up on most any s
53. Grip 3 Unibit and a very slow drill ing speed you drill the two holes shown in figures one and two Drill upside down and be very careful to remove the single chip that the unibit provides These two holes are then x vlinemap scans an imageproc by vertical pixel lines and transforms it by mapproc Input pixelswide pixelshigh imageproc For perspective 3 D and isometric cylinders vlinemap save plrsnap exch def imageproc exch def 300 mul 72 div cvi pixelshigh exch def 300 mul 72 div cvi pixelswide exch def 0 1 pixelswide slinenum exch def save plrsnap1 exch def gsave mapproc newpath slinenum 72 mul 300 div 0 moveto 0 pixelshigh rlineto 0 0 2 rlineto 0 pixelshigh neg rlineto closepath clip newpath imageproc grestore clear plrsnap1 restore for clear plrsnap restore def hlinemap scans an imageproc by horizontal pixel lines and transforms it by mapproc Input pixelswide pixelshigh imageproc For star wars lettering etc hlinemap save plrsnap exch def imageproc exch def 300 mul 72 div cvi pixelshigh exch def 300 mul 72 div cvi pixelswide exch def 0 1 pixelshigh slinenum exch def save pIrsnap1 exch def gsave mapproc newpath 0 slinenum 72 mul 300 div moveto pixelswide 0 rlineto 0 2 0 rlineto pixelswide 0 neg rlineto closepath clip newpath imageproc grestore clear plrsnap1 restore for clear plrsnap restore def o reportvlinemap compiles vlinemap into an array of form xposO yposO yheightO o XposN
54. I ve even taught this to seventh graders and the results will often happen ten times faster and ten times easier than any other method that I know about A second secret is letting your subconcious work on the analysis for you while you are doing simple and rote tasks The tearing method is also lots of fun In fact all of my microprocessor students freshly exposed to tearing last night refused to leave the lab and I simply locked them in at 1 AM this morning Bet you can t tear just one Anyhoo first be sure that you do totally and thoroughly understand exactly what the program does and how to use it Then you will load the program into a known location in your Apple One simple way to do this is to fill the available RAM with 11 elevens and see exactly where the elevens are not after loading My absolute reset or a similar utility may be needed for some protected code Va Drill 3 8 inch hole using a 3 Vise Grip Unibit carefully clear all chips Fig 2 Adding a spent toner emptying hole to a SX cartridge N Be certain that the new hole is centered between the die sink marks 48 2 You then create two disassembled listings and two hex dumps of your code and then heavily reinforce them with Scotch tape or whatever Go through the listing and lightly and quickly scan it seperating those main working code areas from the associated files Important file clues are lots of ques
55. IMShutDown 100B FracMul 1BOB Fix2Long 260B Int2Dec 040B IMVersion 110B FixDiv 1COB Fix2Frac 270B Long2Dec 050B IMReset 120B FracDiv 1D0B Frac2Fix 280B Dec2Int 060B IMStatus 130B FixRound 1E0B Fix2X 290B Dec2Long 090B Multilply 140B FracSqrt 1F0B Frac2Xx 2A0B HexIt 0A0B SDivide 150B FracCos 200B X2Fix 0B0B UDivide 160B FracSin 210B X2Frac OCOB LongMul 170B FixATan2 220B Int2Hex 0D0B LongDivide 180B HiWord 230B Long2Hex wt ee ee eee ee ee eee eee eens TOOL 0C TEXT TOOLS 010C TextBootInit 0COC GetInGlobals 150C InitTextDev 1E0C TextWriteBlock 020C TextStartUp ODOC GetOutGlobals 160C CtlTextDev 1F0C ErrWriteBlock 030C TextShutDown 0E0C GetErrGlobals 170C StatusTextDev 200C WriteCString 040C TextVersion SOFOC SetInputDevice 180C WriteChar 210C ErrWriteCSrting 050C TextReset 100C SetOutputDevice 190C ErrWriteChar 220C ReadChar 060C TextStatus 110C SetErrorDevice 1A0C WriteLine 230C TextReadBlock 090C SetInGlobals 120C GetInputDevice 1BOC ErrWriteLine 240C ReadLine 0A0C SetOutGlobals 130C GetOutputDevice 1C0C WriteString SOBOC SetErrGlobals 140C GetErrorDevice 1D0C ErrWriteString we ee eee eee eee eee TOOL 0E WINDOW MANAGER 010E WindBootInit TrackGoAway 2D0E SetWFrame 410E SetDataSize 020E WindStartUp oveWindow 2E0E GetStruckRgn S420E GetMaxGrow 00
56. IV paperback 326 pages 24 95 Inside Macintosh Volume V paperback 640 pages 26 95 Inside Macintosh Volumes I III hardbound 1240 pages 79 95 Inside Macintosh X Reference paperback 128 pages 9 95 Tech Intro to the Macintosh paperback 320 pages 19 95 Programmer s Into to Macintosh hardbound 224 pages 22 95 Designing Drivdrs for Mac Il amp SE hardbound 288 pages 24 95 Macintosh Hardware Reference hardbound 380 pages 26 95 ProDos 8 Technical Reference hardbound 208 pages 29 95 Apple Ilgs ProDOS 16 Reference hardbound 360 pages 29 95 LaserWriter Reference Manual hardbound 180 pages 19 95 ImageWriter LQ Reference Manual hardbound 272 pages 22 95 ImageWriter II Reference Manual hardbound 232 pages 19 95 HyperCard Script Language Guide hardbound 320 pages 22 95 Human Interface Guidelines paperback 160 pages 14 95 Apple Numerics Manual hardbound 320 pages 29 95 BASIC ProDOS Programming hardbound 296 pages 29 95 Applesoft Tutorial hardbound 304 pages 29 95 Applesoft Reference Manual hardbound 368 pages 22 95 Fig 1 Some Apple Computer authored books J A low cost jogger Die cut laser forms Ultra fast PostScript Several GS OS bugs Apple authored books a copy of this and many of his other fine programs but I just haven t had a chance to properly review them yet In general Roger does do first rate work although he and I differ very strongl
57. Kolor For years I ve had a back burner project going The idea was to take an ordinary Xerox copy and run it va the line cord from the AC outlet decal to just outside the black border hole this connector N Verify that the unit to be modified is in fact a Canon F21680 machine and then unplug Remove the center lid by raising the green handle and removing the two black screws at the rear and the two silver screws on the inside Be gentle Remove the right cover by removing the two silver screws at the rear the black screw at the right bottom and the black screw at the front bottom Again be gentle Cover the temperature decal with a similar sized clear self stick overlay Neatly trim the Clean the front of the right cover and apply the temperature decal so it is 3 8 of an inch in in and 3 8 of an inch up from the lower lefthand corner See Figure five Drill a 13 32 inch hole at the crosshairs on the temperature decal This is easiest to do with a Vise Grip UNIBIT but a pilot hole and reamer can be used instead Deburr the Mount the volume control in the hole Use a nut and a lockwasher behind the panel and a nut and flat washer in front of the panel adjusting for a flush mounting Solder the 150K resistor to the center lug of the volume control keeping the lead both reasonably short and mechanically strong See Figure six Form a loop in the free end of the resistor and trim the lead Stri
58. SoD EEREN 058 52528 GES saa 8 ne ER 5 Sone Panes es E 3 gt3e EDE S238 Pas gen Szy GIG sey ESNS EN z8 S228 sts 2238 oss OFS euxg 3338 S258 Sig S352 wish 2s5 3255 Bes e858 Joost sss otsh BSS ER aS Ses peas esse S68 2I 8F 385 eese 98e FPEF wD 359 CESTA SAEN 5395 S358 2keg GEN FEEF 5359 aegse IREL 5358 aNae Faz gee petae sae ates ores E 7 5 z d od 2 gt Z e 3 2 s 5 Z 2 H As a 3 a e si S M o Se ag Se ne Fg ai So co 2s ER ot 3 5 aes ess Genk Ei ig cN o Sa 22a 1 oszze 5 8 ETL OBO Ona Bo ao 28o SFR ots EEEF E EEA acse ays 588 35s O 9 838 s2en8 88x Ssn5 E 2 SSNS 25n9 235 3283 sEn5 amp 3 2nq N S Sno S Sn N 250 8 SEN5 A gsr Sse s y cave gos Saad 3733 eset Bees tle a cscs SE elle Pees SSE ezs3 Zeck ugs osze gesk ae ee Esga 529 soot Sma EXO n pA Guar Sas oF or GB soar lF 228 Se8r SxD oNge e88ez ebay sees TOES wm geg 2588 ENS SRSA 858 Sasa EEEF AFIN S358 sess unset ane aee Inre ror gt 6rS EKES wont SKET crore 3 g F 5 gt f 5 z 3 z 5 z g A ro lt 2 F ge pa A a lt 2 ei ba oS ao 2D w AN o PBA 5 a c 5 55 8 ob 2 See 3 53o 58gm EER 23r oe 28a ges DLS cS S a ERE 2aga Roo 25a g gt 2 Gry Boon 2y Dole ZEN ogs e HERF Ber ESD SESB PE 5NG Eim EE D En pene ONP Ons NS END aN on wots gus ZEIA gots ae ars Sa E238 LOIN elo ay oZTN aE 20N vax 5525 ast Dl eae se oot Seo oe oR ERL 85S Boo Zgn zs Sui gh to BS35 805 au
59. TXD n c Fig 1 A Ilgs serial cable for PRINTER use J 51 1 ASK THE GURU hard disk support Possibly more fonts perhaps Garamond and Optima for starters along with some more Helvetica weights On the dark side expect continued outrageously high list prices Expect the Quickdraw Mafia to continue to try and shove all their non PostScript non solutions down your throat Expect Adobe to continue to refuse to remove the useless and highly demeaning lock on pathforall and still refuse to properly document all of the most useful hidden Post Script commands And expect Canon to try draconian anti refill measures perhaps by going to a pin free totally welded package For all those of you heavily into electronics be sure and check my Hardware Hacker column over in Radio Electronics this month It features an easy to use full 16 bit digital audio front end for your per sonal computer or whatever Several of my classic hardware books that I do stock autographed copies of here at Synergetics include my CMOS and TTL Cookbooks my Micro Cookbooks I and II and my Active Filter Cookbook and my In credible Secret Money Machine As per usual we also stock Ask the Guru I and IJ and Hardware Hacker IT bound books Book on demand printed with an Apple Ie of course Our biggie this month is a new hard coating process that promises to greatly extend the service life of the Canon SX cartridge drums But l
60. afraid to use an A B switching box on a LaserWriter so they can run faster and cheaper than AppleTalk and still use several host computers The problem here is rather bizarre Certain models of the Hewlett Pac kard LaserJet seem to have a highly flakey serial interface circuit that blows up and self destructs if you so much as think about looking at it sideways Rather than admit they do have a very bad problem H P has simply blamed it all on people using A B switching boxes To the best of my knowledge and belief there never has been any time that anyone using an A B box has hurt an Apple LaserWriter in any way Dealers and salesmen may lie to you on this because they want you to buy a Mac with AppleTalk instead Several readers asked if they were welcome to come visit me or even quest a tinaja Wail shore nuff Except that I need a week or two s advance notice I also live a totally ridiculous distance from anywhere Thatcher Arizona is a sixpack away from Tucson and even further from Phoenix seven hours round trip by stagecoach assuming you don t get eaten by a Gila Monster The local Upper Sonoran lifezone and my off the wall attitude both tend to be a tad of a cultural shock for easterners But hail yaess Come on an visit fer a spell Yes I do speak to user groups But on your nickel and not on mine My Introduction to Postscript video is far cheaper and makes for an interesting show all by it
61. and foremost they have now at long last come out solidly and unequivocally against any and all forms of copy protection In Apple Direct for January 1989 they flat out state that not only will they not in any way shape or form help out with the development or the debugging of your copy protection scheme but that they also most def initely don t want any copy protected program to ever be run on any Apple machine at any time for any purpose They also have a free new Just Add Water book to help you form or improve your own Apple user group The premier issue of APDAlog is also now newly available Apple has recently shuffled all of their developer programs The brand new Partners program gives you all the bells and whistles for 750 for the first year This includes a program and development library and the 50 2 ability to buy most products at half off To be a partner you must end up actually marketing Apple compatible products and have a genuine business plan Existing developers will trans fer over when they once again come up for recertification Their new Associates program is open to anyone but has fewer bene fits First year cost is 500 with the library and 350 without Individual software and book bits and pieces are also now available to anyone directly through their APDA service This one is a mere 20 per year and a real bargain Finally there is a brand new Apple Consultant program
62. and pointed out that ordinary food dye can be used to get other colors besides the stock red or white Did I ever tell you the one about my Ask the Guru reprints or my Postscript Show and Tell or my new Don Lancaster s PostScript Secrets book and disk combo for all major personal computers Or all about my Hardware Hacker column that you might find over in Radio Electronics magazine As per usual this is your column and you can get tech help and off the wall networking per the end box Our feature distraction this month is an exitable PostScript text scanner But first let s find out How can I do a IIgs Screen Lock On the original Apple II there was no immediate or obvious way to tell where the video circuitry happened to be scanning at any particular instant This produced badly torn animation screen glitches and other unpleas antries that usually gave you a less than optimum video display Eventually some sneaky hardware and software tricks were discovered by Bob Bishop by myself and by others that let you do an effective screen lock with your software This in turn led you to smoother screen changes to glitchless animation and the ability to mix text HIRES and LORES graphics in any combination anywhere on the screen real time windowing improved color killing gentle scrolling video wipes and fades and in general all around more professional video results Much of this is now ancient
63. any and all commercial rights are fully and completely reserved You may copy it for your personal use provided the header remains intact and provided it is not included in any commercial software product or listing of any sort Yes the ready to run gonzo justify disks are available in most formats for most personal computers Write or call if you are interested 44 8 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU November 1989 Several hot stamping ideas My computer workstations Old and new game paddles Using snoop and superexec PostScript nuisance routine o good deed shall ever go unpunished At least in the computer publishing world Macintosh Today recently went belly up because of a corporate bean counter who was upset with the rate of increase of ad revenue Worse still Bob Sander Cedarlof has ceased publishing his great Apple Assembly Lines which was one of the finest Apple magazines anywhere ever It seems that Bob finally let a few frivolous matters of food cloth ing and shelter get in his way Bob does have a bunch of back issues and whatever available Once gone they are gone forever You might contact him directly for more information Steve Ciarcia is leaving BYTE to go whole hog on his own already great Circuit Cellar Ink magazine His final November and December BYTE columns are absolute mind blowers that involve a parallel processor that produces Mandlebrot fractal images in near real t
64. are similar with the ex ception that a pair of potentiometers are mechanically linked together into one assembly The pushbuttons work by bringing their respective button lines high to 5 volts when they are activated Note that PBO gets shared with the open apple key and PB1 gets shared with the closed apple key on all the newer machines Note also that a defective game paddle joystick or graphics tablet can simulate a per manant holding down of one of the apple keys doing some wildly wrong things to AppleWorks to AppleWriter or to several other programs Pushbutton 0 or the open apple key is read by doing a PEEK 16287 from Basic or else a BIT C061 from machine language A result greater than 127 or a set N flag means the button or key is currently pressed Similarly either Pushbutton 1 or the closed apple key is read by doing a PEEK 16286 from Basic or a BIT C062 from machine language The paddle or joystick potentio meters must be 150K units that will actually change from 0 to 150K over their mechanically active range Note that other resistance values and other standards are used on other personal computers as a general rule the pad dles or joystick must be matched to the computer they are run on The potentiometers form the varia ble charging resistor in a quad timer circuit that is in the 555 chip family At the start of a timing interval a timing capacitor is allowed to start charging The
65. at all that ran on their choice of Mac IBM or even VAX workstations The results All of the no nothing AppleWriter beginners consistently got faster results and far better results than all the finest Mac VAX and 386 power users which our entire Gila Valley had to offer And they did so having far more fun and with far fewer hassles Here is what you need for a decent PostScript word processor a a very powerful and friendly word processor or editor that will work directly with ordinary and unformatted text files b the ability to send and receive all those files as PostScript data from within the same program all the while receiving the error messages and recording any long code modules sent back from the LaserWriter c the ability to freely and visibly em bed font changing escape commands and other control characters directly N NOTE Outputs are unbalanced at 0 and 3 volts The max recomended length is five feet For longer runs and true bipolar balanced RS 232 add a single chip and single 5v supply driver such as a Maxim MAX 232 data shown as female DIP socket on motherboard use a 4 wire telephone cable 4709 470Q 4709 DSR red RXD green TA 2 a shown as female g 0000 o P E E DB 25 socket on cable end DTR yellow Fig 1 A game paddle to RS 232 serial adaptor cable J 50 1 ASK THE GURU ia NEXT OBJECT FILE NAME IS BAUD 57600 0300 030
66. certainly will work Can I convert a LaserJet Into a LaserWriter P T Barnum was right The only two little fatal flaws in the Hewlett Packard LaserJet series of printers are that they are totally brain dead and as factory stock are incapable of speaking PostScript In my opinion these fatal flaws make all of the LaserJets totally useless for any serious desktop publishing Many LaserJet users apparently agree for they are finally realizing how bad they have been had and are flooding our helpline with pleas for help salvaging their investment Let s start off with some positive comments The LaserJets and the LaserWriters both use nearly iden tical and very well performing Canon CX or the newer SX printing engines Sadly these engines represent only around 15 percent of a laser printer it is the PostScript raster image pro cessor that does all of the important work and ends up getting nearly all of the useful results The slide in toner cartridges are fully interchangeable between similar December 1989 series of LaserJets and LaserWriters But note that you can not and must not attempt swapping a laser printer cartridge with a personal copier one The toner chemistry light sensitivity and interlocks are totally different Yes the cartridges particularly on those older CX machines are easily refillable several times for as little as 7 50 per refill as we have seen in past columns and in both volumes of A
67. clock speed and possibly an in creased vertical screen resolution I still haven t yet received my new LaserWriter NTX But based upon some quickie tests on a dealer demo I do have some predictions on the ultimate outcome First and foremost this is a great machine that except for some serious problems just might set a new standard for low end laser printers for several years to come The apparent new LaserWriter II problems are these 1 Per page toner costs can be as much as fifteen times higher than on the older LaserWriters and all the images are not all that much blacker than those you get from the latest of third party toner refills for the older CX machines 2 You still will have to go to Hewlett Packard for manuals for parts and for service info Apple ap pears to be paying H P a 50 rebate for each LaserWriter sold since the machine is much more useful when you have the outstanding H P manual 33440 90904 on hand 3 The LocalTalk network will horrendously slow the NTX click to clunk time for many jobs down so badly that the NT without LocalTalk is often ridiculously faster than the NTX with LocalTalk This is espec ially a problem on the IIgs 4 The suggested list prices are an outright joke that nobody could pos sibly treat seriously and finally 5 The hard disk usage and its support is both very poorly done and excessively restrictive At the very least the disk should double as a netw
68. column All you really have to do is ray trace a pair of similar tri angles to locate the end points on a picture plane that lies between the subject and the observer Three global parameters are under your control The XO value is how far to the right or left of center the observer is sitting The YO value is Va N Fig 3 AppleWriter strikes again how far in front of the picture plane the observer is sitting Finally the ZO value will be the height of the observer s eyes above or below the ground plane Now it is important to remember that two point perspective like any attempt whatsoever in showing a 3 D world on a 2 D sheet of paper is an illusion and an approximation Artists usually recommend a 5 1 to 15 1 ratio for YO or the illusion may fail Put another way you usually want to be five or more times the distance away as the object is wide Architects will prefer fifteen times Thus fairly large values of YO will often give you the most realistic final results Similarly an architect will almost always use an eye level for his ZO and very high or very low views will be unrealistic Thus you will most often use a fairly low value for ZO Remember that all the vertical lines will remain vertical in any two point perspective drawing Your fourth control parameter is called OBJROT This one lets you rotate any individual object on the ground plane Think of the gro
69. come out better looking I have not taken one apart yet but presumably there has been a com puter board redesign to pick up more modern components an easing of the password blowup travesty additional memory for downloadable fonts and modestly faster speed The Version 47 PostScript ROM firmware is also presumably still being used Yes the SX cartridges can still be refilled for under 10 But some early rumors report that the SX cartridge drums are now ridiculously easier to scratch than they were before on the older CX The Apple high end machine is still a bit of a mystery at this writing It is presumably very pricey with a faster and larger PostScript engine intended for shared group use with a 68020 main processor a hard disk provision and lots of fonts Plus a few other bells and whistles We ll see lots more details on both of these new machines after I have a chance to do some further snooping and user testing Stay tuned Meanwhile several of you helpline callers have had some very positive comments on the new NEC LC 890 PostScript printer that is intended to compete one on one with the Laser Writers While I haven t yet received one for testing to date hint hint this beast apparently uses a liquid crystal shutter instead of a scanning laser and seems to use an in house engine design I d tend to wonder what the long term reliability and pixel uniformity of the new liquid crystal shutter w
70. def for multiple timing stopwatchoff stoptimer reporttimer def stopwatchon resettimer starttimer def tan dup sin exch cos dup 0 eq pop 0 000001 if div def tangent tray statusdict manualfeed false put def stop manual feed width stringwidth pop def finds x width of string yestestpage serverdict begin 0 exitserver statusdict begin true setdostartpage end end quit def restore test page end Fig 5 A PostScript nuisance dictionary S 45 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU December 1989 pple has just introduced a new version of the IIc It includes an internal power supply and built in 3 5 inch drive and runs up to 3 3 times faster The price was also lowered slightly The memory expension connector has been changed Third party mem ory expansions to one megabyte and beyond by Applied Engineering and the usual suspects are expected They also further upgraded the IIgs operating system to version 4 0 This is the first time a true and full 16 Bit IIgs operating system was provided Outside of it running considerably faster and fixing several bugs there are not too many changes over the recently released version 3 2 system master An upgrade kit is available from your dealer for 39 Plans are afoot to make the manuals and the documentation available through the usual BBS and user group sources Prices of most memory intensive Apple products were also sharply raised now tha
71. dup lastchar exch def ssstart sub dup chars exch chars add def sslen exch def ssarray ssa mark spacestretch charstretch ssstart sslen shiftproc fontn 4 get put ssa ssa 1 add def newshiftproc def more Fig 2A My PostScript gonzo justify routines group Or check on AppleLink As a reminder a free list of all your local user groups is available by calling up 800 538 9696 extension 500 What are Color Proofing Systems A color proofing system is any way of creating an accurate mockup or a prototype before an expensive and high volume color printing job is begun There are dozens of different color proofing systems available At least in theory some of these should be ideal for newer desktop publishing and LaserWriter uses Unfortunately it is extremely dif ficult to get any information on any of these so I ll let you tell me rather than vice versa We already know about the Kroy Kolor process that uses a carrier to convert black toner images into most any metallic or matte color And we have briefly looked at the Color Key and the Scotchcal Label processes from 3 M These use a simple photographic chemistry to give you clear and colored areas on a polyester sheet or label stock The LetraSet people have some stuff called LetraChrome proofing materials but these turkeys were so snotty to me that I hesitate to even mention their products at all Then there is IdentiColor who does seem
72. ers to discover and suitably misapply them in unintended ways So for this month s contest just tell me about anything at all in the way of obscure neat stuff Something that a veterinarian a sign painter a blacksmith a weaver a stained glass artisan or a potter might use every day but that is totally unknown else where in the real world As per usual an Incredible Secret Money Machine to the best twenty entries and an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest to the best entry of all We will share all of the results with you in later columns What is the Black Write Versus White Write Laser Printing Controversy There sure seems to be bunches of misinformation on this topic not to mention all of the outright lies Let us try to set the record straight It turns out there are two different methods of designing a laser printer engine In a black write engine such as the Canon CX or SX any spot the laser beam hits on the drum becomes a black spot on the paper In a white write engine such as the Riccoh any spot the beam hits becomes a white spot on the paper So far so good The problem comes in when you try to put a round laser light spot into a square hole on the paper The spot usually has to be somewhat larger than the square But if it gets too large very ugly things will happen Figure two shows you what will typically occur In the case of the black write machines it is difficult to get ver
73. fewest major bugs in it On the other hand the version 38 1 chips let you bypass the font lockout on pathforall This is an incredibly powerful tool that is conspicuously absent from the newer ROM chip sets For any given version you can either obtain one half of your ROM set which gives you a 11 font Laser Writer or else the entire ROM set which instead will give you a 35 font LaserWriter Plus One very important gotcha The keying on their main connectors is different and the Apple board plugs in upside down compared to the HP board Make sure you do thoroughly understand what you are doing before you make your final connections Here are some resources to get you started on all this Used LaserJets are available from your Sunday paper or any of dozens of Computer Shopper advertisers as are several brand new CX engines of dubious origin Two sources of the LaserWriter boards are Pre Owned Electronics and Richard Harold at Shreve Systems A complete set of quite simple conversion plans is available for 10 from Custom Technology while the thorough repair and maintenence manuals are available directly from Hewlett Packard Their manual part number for the CX engine is 02686 90904 while the newer SX manual is numbered 33440 90904 Already converted pretested and ready to run units are available from either Thompson and Thompson or from Custom Technology while the toner refilling materials and supply kits ar
74. get all of the credit all of the pay and all of the promotions Not to mention both an office anda real desk Many of the larger and old line electronics outfits tend to treat their techs and supertechs as second class citizens severely limiting all of their advancement and salary opportun ities These problems are especially acute in aerospace and defense So 0332if 0331 you can handle all the need ed math and can pass all the required non engineering courses then that 0334BSEE 0331 will offer something around a 033426 5 0331 decibel better cost benefit ratio over the O334BSEET 0331 degree The helpline response over that fluxgate magnetometer compass we looked at back in the December 0334RE 0331 has been utterly astounding and do thank you Another source for the fluxgate magnetometer compass kits is O332Rusty Circuits 0331 0332Radio Shack 0331 also now has a low cost solid state fluxgate automotive compass This does appear to be a two piece unit that has the fluxgate sensor windshield mounted by way of a short length of five conductor cable The display itself is a servo like pair of coils that can activate a magnetized compass rose disk The accuracy does seem very limited but it costs only 0334 49 95 0331 This should hack beautifully More on this whenever Radio Shack also has a new and intelligent power strip that turns on all of your computer peripherals or home video accessories whenever a main load is switched on or
75. had hot glue selectively placed only where you really wanted it By putting a dry ink based carrier in contact with the Xerox copy and applying heat and pressure the toner would remelt and grab the dry ink off the carrier sheet Presto The near instant conversion of a copier or a laser printed output into brilliant metallics bright mattes a solid black silvers golds and even some pearl effects Along with a unique shiny high gloss varnish or even a true plastic laminating for scuff resistant menus or book covers As a bonus the carrier sheet can also become an instant negative useful for such things as overhead transparencies If you wanted to you could even reuse any remaining part of any carrier as often as you liked But there were serious problems The Omnicrom people were Brits and thus predictably and monumentally mismanaged all of their marketing efforts in the colonies Their early materials were not all that reliable Worst of all they saw nothing uncon scionable about the charging of over 1400 for a fusion machine that was nothing but a pair of heated rollers that would turn for you A few years ago the Kroy Kolor people did become an Omnicrom licensee and then dramatically im proved all the materials added more colors and options and made them much easier to get They also did improve and modestly lower the cost of all their fusion machines You can get several free evaluation 43 3
76. his tory Full details do appear in my Enhancing your Apple II and Ile volumes I and II The IIgs has three new resources that make doing screen locks of most any complexity much easier and far more powerful Figure one bares all Machine language location C019 has a simple vertical blanking flag in its most significant bit location If this bit is a 1 then the vertical re trace is taking place and anything you do to the screen will currently remain invisible If you do wait until the vertical blanking interval before changing any video mode you might get a glitchless change without any screen tearing or flashing Note that the sense of C019 is the opposite of that on the Ile Watch this detail Machine language location C02E will let you directly read the vertical line counting hardware By changing the top of the screen while scanning the bottom and vice versa you can now do glitchless animation By the way the cause of many glitches is giving the viewer a simultaneous mix of the old and new information during a field Note that there are nine vertical counter bits The least significant of these appears in C02F along with the horizontal counter bits Thus August 1988 CO4E by itself will only read even vertical lines Finally that secret machine lan guage location at C02F lets you directly read the horizontal line coun ter Since the horizontal counts do change at a one microsecond clip you h
77. ing system is nearing an end Instead you just take lots of RAM and a RISC chip that s running like a bat out of Cupertino and then provide suitable firmware microcode that temporarily downgrades it into your choice of a 80386 a 65832 or a 68030 And then runs anything by anybody Real time or even faster Similarly disk drives are getting smarter and more flexible A multi sync drive that can accept any past or present media shouldn t be all that far away Interestingly enough the new GS OS operating system does include a FST or File System Trans lator code that in theory will let you read from or to any disk file in any format crossing any boundary Oh yeah There is a stupidity on the new IIgs version 4 0 GS OS oper ating system that is driving all you newcomers up the wall At a first Va N glance it appears as if there is no support whatsoever for 5 1 4 inch disk drives in this new operating system Actually the needed 5 1 4 drivers are buried in a subdirectory named TOOL DIRECTORY A copy of the drivers have to be moved up into SYSTEM SYSTEM DRIVER Full tech details on GS OS are now available from APDA Meanwhile Hewlett Packard has finally gotten around to paying their PostScript license fees No sense in rushing these things Another very few years and it should actually be possible to do useful desktop pub lishing from a new factory stock H P LaserJet printer My views on what s hi
78. is no point whatsoever in using a full 16 bit word here to do so would February 1988 most likely slow you down and cer tainly would double the length of all of your word processor text files Since you now have a choice of memory and accumulator size and a separate choice of index register widths a semi intelligent lister such as the L command in the monitor gets confused if it does not know what you had in mind when it starts doing its listing Thus and again per figure two you use the monitor 0 m or l m commands tell your lister whether it is to expect any 8 bit or 16 bit mem ory and accumulator references You separately use the 0 x and 1 x com mands to tell your lister whether it is to expect either 8 bit or 16 bit widths for your X and Y index registers Note that both the m and the x here must always be in lower case For instance a code sequence of A9 06 EA will be listed as LDA 06 and a NOP if you are in the 8 bit mode 1 m and will be listed as LDA EA06 if you are instead listing in the 16 bit mode O m Depending on where you are in your program one and only one of these will be correct and if you do select the wrong one you will get meaningless garbage drawapples draws open and closed apple symbols These symbols are registered trademarks of Apple Computer Consult them directly for legal use restrictions openapple gsave fontsize exch def Symbol findfont fontsiz
79. it for business cards yov ll be amazed at the results for a zero cost quick and dirty process What is Pixie Dust I have found one partial solution for the intolerably abysmal scratch resistance of the Canon type SX laser printer cartridges The method seems to work a lot better than sticking pins into Canon advertisements The larger and older xerography machines will use a standard powder called drum conditioner that acts as a lubricant and noticably reduces but does not outright eliminate all of the scratch problems Unfortunately drum conditioner is normally available only in railroad tank car lots and then only to a few approved insiders Arlin Shepard of Laser Products has repackaged the drum conditioner into a 3 packet of Pixie Dust that is enough for a dozen or more Laser Writer cartridges or their reloads Figure one shows you how to take a childs athletic sock and convert it into a pixie dust duster What you do is very lightly dust the drum when you first install or later reload the cartridge Be careful to not rotate or get any thumbprints on the drum when you do this After a few copies most of the pixie dust will collect on the wiper and doctor blades and will continue to work from there Meanwhile working on the theory that every little bit helps do continue to stick the pins into all the Canon ads you see Somebody somehow just has got to the the attention of these epsilon minuses Tell
80. keystone justify is used to wedge out the topics in the title Va about as sharp as five pounds of raw liver short for this sort of thing 033c Library Research 033d home reachable at 0334 602 965 7003 0331 showpage My personal horror stories here include your Canadian post office re fusing to accept my first class mail and waiting three hours in a bank for them to decide to use the Canadian exchange rate for any bank in Nova Scotia Honest They couldn t find any country that was named Nova Scotia so they had to call up the head office seven times in a row These epsilon minuses were Finally they ended up giving me 0334 7 65 0331 for a 0334 24 50 0331 check Life is too Our focus this month is on the electronic lighting controls for rock concerts discos theater lighting for color organs and whatever But first lets get up to date on Several exciting things have been happening at the library lately First and foremost lots of libraries are now putting their card catalogs and public serials lists onto new on line electronic 0334BBS 0331 bulletin boards So you can now find out what s avail able without leaving One example of this would be the 0332Arizona State University 0331 library 0334BBS 0331 The second really big news item for all of you hackers is that many libraries are now offering the great 0332Dialog Information Service 0331 Dialog is a new supergroup electronic search servic
81. ll get will be unbeatably superb Those canned applications can be easier to learn and do give you a crude and typically very innacurate screen approximation to the printed page On the other hand these pro grams are all quite expensive A page making program at best can only handle less than 15 percent of the total possible PostScript uses Worse yet you have to do everything their way rather than the way you really want to I personally feel that I can get consistently higher quality infinitely more flexibility faster printing and ridiculously more control by working directly in the PostScript language I do so using ProDOS AppleWriter 2 0 or 2 1 on a Ile or a Igs for all of my text and all of my graphics including schematics isometrics perspective and even my printed circuits To prove my point just tell me which canned applications program you are using and I will send you something great looking and very easy to do in PostScript that you can not directly create with your pro gram A free book if you prove me Va line1 06 setlinewidth def line2 12 setlinewidth def line3 18 setlinewidth def m moveto def r 0 x def neg 0 x def u 0 exch x def d 0 exch neg x def Copyright c 1987 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal use permitted so long as this header remains intact setgrid gsave size e
82. microseconds on a Ile 16 for the IIgs integer square root appeared in the September 1987 issue of the Apple Assembly Lines This jewel uses table lookup and some off the wall thinking to come up with a fast elegant and not overly long less than 1K solution In general the algorithm for many square root routines is based on your taking the root series 1 4 9 16 25 and then taking the first difference between each root 3579 11 and finally noting that the second differ ence is always exactly two Reverse and iterate the process to calculate the needed root Tell Me All About Laser Printing Papers Practically any uncoated or non meltable paper can be used with a laser printer although a very careful selection and testing is often needed to get the best possible results Let s start off with Hornsnaggle s two laws of paper buying 1 Any of the old line printing paper supply wholesalers will eat you alive with outlandish prices totally ridiculous minimum orders the indecipherable pricing oddball substitutions and inexcusable delays These outfits do however have excellent and free sample kits that are definitely worth ripping off And Hornsnaggle also tells us that 2 the basis weight of a paper is a totally meaningless concept invented by a consortium of paper salesmen and specifically designed to confuse and confound you The weight of a paper has nothing whatsoever to do with how thick it i
83. of Mitchell Printing for his help on this John was also the tinaja quest winner in our color proofing contest Please let me know of anything else you feel should be included in this list We ll even make a response one way to win this month s contest What is This Month s PostScript Utility I ve been doing a lot of custom PostScript programming lately that seems to share one common thread There are an incredible number of you out there that want to take data from any old data base off any old computer and attractively convert it into PostScript tables that use pro portional spacing and mixed fonts seperately being able to selectively use left center right or fill justifi cation on each individual column All bounded with fancy PostScript line art And of course all done with perfect column alignment And all done with a minimum of new typing January 1989 The key problem is that most older data bases assume that you are using fixed pitch printer fonts As soon as you go to a second column you get a ragged column alignment and other nasty problems Well figure four shows you my new PostScript ctab callout tabular routine It will semi automatically accept input from any data base and convert it into any number of col umns each column of which can be independently positionable in any Copyright c 1989 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All right
84. of a more or less complete list More details on each individual tool do appear in the Hgs Toolbox Reference Manauls volumes I and II available through the APDA people And for a super secret ultra fast and extremely simple method of tearing apart most any machine language program check into my Enhancing your Apple Ie volume I Which Laser Printer Should I Buy That is a very good question that comes up at least a dozen times a day on the helpline Here are what the helpline callers seem to be thinking at present First and foremost genuine Adobe Post Script is an absolute must since there is between a 50 1 and 100 1 perform ance advantage over all of the out dated imitators and hanger ons Secondly you might want to avoid the Riccoh engine since helpline callers do report serious problems imaging smaller text cite the slow speed note the lack of a manual feed and complain about the long term print reliability It seems to me that this leaves you with five reasonably viable options options towards genuinely useful laser printing today 1 The Laserwriter NT or the NTX which should be the center of the universe of PostScript laser printing for the next several years 2 The older Laserwriter plus is now being discounted for as low as 1800 with the latest of third party toner refills now being almost as black as the newer machines 3 The brand new laserless NEC LC 890 PostScri
85. off A few helpline callers have been asking for circuits to do this Several of you Canadian readers have been wondering why very few of those smaller electronics outfits will even give them the time of day The response is that there are more than enough hassles involved that it is almost always a net loss of energy and time and money to do so Fig 5a A sample three column gonzo textfile 49 6 ASK THE GURU all the rules for inserting figures or artwork and any command macros that can make life easier You can either persistently down load all of your templates whenever printer power is first applied or else tow them along as a prolog to each and every file If you go the persis tent download route your files will be shorter will download faster and a person much less knowledgeable in PostScript can use them in an office environment On the other hand the prolog templates at the start of each document are easier to change and customize on the fly Let s look at two new examples of templates One is quite simple and the other rather complex Figure three will show you a just dump the text template that simply sets margins and fonts and gives you a centered top page number on all but the first page By adding a suitable letterhead procedure plus a curve traced signature you can convert this into any custom business letter tem plate of your choosing To use this template set it up as a
86. old Send PS and even a properly working Epson driver This is inexcusable So step number one is to flush all of your internal IIgs serial firmware and substitute a Super Serial Card This at least will get you up to a compatible 19200 baud and your de facto baud rates can end up in the 16000 range at least when you are using AppleWriter But I wanted and needed much more than this Just how fast can an unassisted He or IIgs output serial data The suprising answer to this is 14 Megabaud Yeah Mega not kilo You do this by putting your data on the super HIRES screen and using the video connector for the serial output To do so though would be socially irresponsible because of the extreme chagrin and stress this would cause in the Mac and 386 communities Instead let s just be content to plod along at a leisurely but honest 57600 baud That will still end up ridiculously faster than AppleTalk with its heavy software overhead and much faster than most anything else available on the Mac or a 386 machine And it opens up some of the really exciting speedup tricks that we will look at next month For now we will use a transmit only simplex mode using hard wire DTR handshaking You can drop on down to 19200 baud with your super serial card anytime you really need a full two way comm channel C N 1 Get into BASIC SYSTEM and then CALL 151 to enter the monitor 2 Enter the following code 0300 4C 04 03 F
87. on a 1 add after calling random Two listers of resident fonts are provided The listfonts command will return a list of all the currently resi dent PostScript fonts these may be internal custom created or down loaded back to the host The printfonts will in stead print a list directly onto paper for you The testpage can be defeated with notestpage and later restarted by ac tivating my yestestpage command These several dozen brand new commands are my choice of what I presently think I would like for me More of these goodies will almost certainly be along later Obviously you can easily and permanently rearrange the scenery to suit yourself So why don t you As yet another stupid contest this month just show me how to improve upon any of the existing nuisance commands or add some new ones that others might find useful Let s hear from you November 1989 b Copyright c 1988 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 o 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal non commercial use permitted so long as h this header remains present and intact Latest disk costs 24 50 Ree nuisancedict is persistently downloaded as a dictionary Activate with nuisance begin 0 exitserver serverdict begin 200 dict nuisance exch def nuisance begin 1000 dict nuisance exch def nuisance begin acos 2 copy dup mul exch dup mul sub sqrt exch pop exch atan def xside hypot acos asin 2 copy dup mul exc
88. on where and why all these numbers come from did appear in the March 1987 issue of Computer Shopper or else are found in my Ask the Guru volume I Where is the Winning Ticket Right inside your PostScript laser printer of course Those custom and sequentially numbered tickets for raf fles plays civic events or whatever can be a very hot seller These are all quickly done on your LaserWriter We saw my sequential numbering step and repeat routines back in the July 87 issue of Computer Shopper also available in volume one of Ask The Guru One reader suggested perforating the tear off tab of your own tickets by using a threadless and bobbinless sewing machine Note that this is an extremely dangerous process owing to the enormous hostility it evokes in the female of the species Otherwise you can get various sized ticket blanks through your local Paper Plus store or from any of a number of wholesale suppliers For instance Blanks USA will send you 300 free and prenumbered large sam ple tickets Two of their competitors include Ticket Express and the folks over at Quick Tickets Please let me know all your laser ticket printing experiences so I can pass them on to the others What is This Month s PostScript Utility Back in October of 1988 I showed you my gonzo justify routines that could give you exceptional quality 49 5 typesetting especially at 300 DPI Some readers have asked for
89. on while you are creating your form or whatever and then turned off for your final image One trick that beginners to rubber gridding will often miss your font sizes and linewidths are usually much smaller than before It is often a good idea to make the basic line spacing on a form one unit high A suitable font to fit in a one unit high form line would have a size of 0 75 points Any additional rubbergrid utilities and icons are easily added for such applications as invoices order pads electronic schematics ad layouts organizational and flow charts per spective sketches printed circuit lay outs and isometric drawings Give me a call if you need more info on any of these fire response grid requires rubbergrid utilities of figure four 90 90 13 setgrid 41 50 showgrid line1 Fig 9 3 Rabbertriehtorhi kot fort fighrethPearpt delete to turn off grid N line3 33 5 2 3 m 31 25 u 12 r 14 75 u 25 5 r 48 d 25 512 u 121 dA NN m AA OER AANA DOE m OR Rr dk4AdQm OR Kv Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU December 1987 his signal indicates that the referee has just swallowed his whistle Apple recently has been doing everything from 100 yard punt returns to giving all of their opposition automatic two point safeties Their new Hypercard for the Mac is really something Then again just maybe it is something else Trouble is that nobody inside or outside the company has
90. or joystick here Shorts or glitches can operation Second user cause damage 5 GAME PADDLE 0 BUTTON INPUT 1 1 Expects a 10K to 150K This pushbutton 1 input is variable resistor to 5vdc shared with the closed apple for paddle or joystick key No connection logic operation First user zero 5 vdc logic one U U 666460 shown as female E DB 9 socket on m rear panel 9 GAME PADDLE 3 BUTTON INPUT 2 6 Expects a 10K to 150K A third and rarely used variable resistor to 5vdc auxiliary pushbutton input for paddle or joystick No connection logic zero operation Second user 5 vdc logic one 8 GAME PADDLE 1 BUTTON INPUT 0 Expects a 10K to 150K The pushbutton 0 input is variable resistor to 5vdc shared with the open apple for paddle or joystick key No connection logic operation First user zero 5 vdc logic one Fig 2 Connections to the new Apple Game Connector J 45 2 Yes we have a Mac It is used once a month to handle our PostScript disk production and translations Other wise it serves as a handy doorstop and Orville the cat sure does like to sleep on it Kathy who runs a service bureau down the street uses a IIgs and a H to do our order processing shipping label printing and all our mailing list maintenence Clone translations and production are done across town and the Atari stuff is handled by a Tucson caver via modem I also still do use six of the KIM 1
91. parts There are just enough trade in and repair LaserWriter Plus boards out there to make this a viable route to a low cost PostScript printer The cur rent street price is typically 450 for a trade in board There is a glut on the market for used LaserJet I s because they are both brain dead and incapable of even speaking PostScript without a very costly add on The current street price is around 700 There s also an untrue myth that implies that older CX engines aren t as black as the newer SX engines In fact the latest of the third party toner refills for those CX machines are just about as black and they can give you per page toner costs as low as one fifteenth that of the current SX costs Thus the older machines are actually better suited to serious production work And as far as service life goes you can keep bolting H P parts onto these forever One of mine is rapidly approaching 400 000 copies There are three versions of Laser Writer boards available These now include versions 23 0 38 1 and 43 2 the latter often erronously referred to as a version 47 ROM 49 3 You can find the version by giving a version flush command or else by looking at the test page A 3 0 is version 47 while the lower num bers will be the older versions For most people most of the time the latest version 47 ROM s are far and away the best choice since this is the fastest code having the
92. print flush if print flush bstall forall def Fig 3 PostScript scanmap and bitmap utilities J 48 3 ASK THE GURU capped with a nickel Caplug or else some very agressive tape There are three major steps to the refilling process You first open the holding tank hole and carefully shake out the excess toner Do this outside and avoid breathing any of the toner You then reseal the holding tank hole open the fresh toner tank hole and pour in a bottle of refill toner Finally you remove the old fusion wiper wand and peel and stick a new wiper pad in place Another tip keep the green toner dial advanced all the way to nine for any and all rough drafts and for all internal use documents Note that the higher the number the less toner you will use Cartridge life can easily be doubled with this simple technique I currently recommend using Lazer Products to supply toner pixie dust wiper pads and drum recoating How does the Thick Paper Ploy Work Way back in college I tended to get very high grades on all of my lab reports In fact that s what got me started of into much of this current silliness Since the statue of limita tions is long since over I will here reveal the secret to getting very high grades on lab reports You simply hand in a report that is thicker than any of the others Now there are all sorts of ways of creating a thick lab report but far and away the most cost effect
93. production facility that is intended to churn these new machines out Just as soon as I do I ll give you the full lowdown on printing speeds and whatever Naturally there will be fatal errors and other serious bugs on all of these new printers so my Computer Shopper columns might serve as a clearing house and forum to let you know what these bugs are and how to get around them There are really three brand new LaserWriters all of which share the same Canon SX engine This engine is just about the best available today for low end laser printing On the other hand the per page toner costs are still substantially higher than on the CX more on this below and the latest third party CX toner refills are almost as solidly black as those you can get from the SX You can upgrade between any of the new machines by exchanging cards There is now a several hundred dollar penalty to do so The low end machine is known as the LaserWriter II SC In my opinion this gutless wonder is a totally use less joke since it does not speak the industry standard PostScript page description language The SC is beneath further comment The mid range machine is called the LaserWriter II NT This one is essentially an improved upgrade of the LaserWriter Plus with pretty much all of the same features You now have a more durable smaller lighter and generally upgraded en gine that holds more paper and feeds it more efficiently handles enve
94. reloaded If your application does trash a certain obscure memory area then 33 4 certain obscure ProDOS 16 features are not any longer available Calling them will bomb the machine Need less to say Appleworks trashes these locations Ho Hum Now for that really funny bug It seems that the Smartport command to eject a 3 5 inch disk is exactly the same as the SCSI command to chew up the media and spit out the seeds A lot of programmers have been doing quick and dirty eject routines and surprise will end up totally trashing their SCSI hard disks A summary of a safe and correct way to eject a 3 5 inch disk appears in figure two It is absolutely es sential that you make sure that a 3 5 inch drive is in fact in use before you try and eject the disk Many thanks to Tom Vier for his comments on this How can I Cut a Sheet of Paper It is apparently utterly and totally impossible I had hoped to be able to give you a rundown on the clamping paper cutters this month Clamping cutters are needed while desktop publishing to professionally trim books or booklets and to accu rately cut thick stacks of paper But the salespeople in the paper cutter industry are totally unreal One screamed at me over the phone You can t afford one and hung up on me Another one five times in a row sent me the same poorly cut sheet of paper that says they sell paper cut ters but absolutely refused to send
95. some time and effort Show me More of the Main IIgs Tool List As we have seen over the past two months a complete listing of all of the IIgs tools in numeric order is very hard to find Yet it is extremely useful for analyzing other people s working IIgs code Our third install ment appears in figure three The tearing method that lets you tear apart and analyze virtually any machine language code suprisingly fast and amazingly easy I ve even taught this to seventh graders does appear in my Enhancing Your Apple II volume I See you there Any New and Off the Wall Graphic Arts Resources Well I do have a few loose ends that have been kicking around here for a while Ferinstance August 1988 Copyright c 1988 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All commercial rights reserved Personal use permitted so long as this header remains intact Demo disk costs 39 50 Scans raw input text converting to line by line strings for further PostScript processing Can be used for emulators that you can switch into and out of under software command for character substitution to redefine the escape character or other special characters To begin scanning raw text use the startscan command or an esc g alias To stop scanning raw text use an escape followed by your exitchar character Scanning also automatically stops on end of file For the
96. text Run it four times back to back for a fair test Your second third and fourth passes should run at the wide open NTX engine speed provided your computer can communicate as fast an as Apple lle fonto 60 627 1 0 2 W z fonti 116 627 1 1 672 2 hat is the future of the z 116 616 6 2 5 3272 Apple Ilgs Stan Veit z 116 606 1 2517 2 and have been kicking z 116 595 6 924 2 this around and we are z 60 585 1 1 131 2 getting a few different answers from z 60 574 6 1 25 2 several different sources z 70 564 1 2 5 2736 At present the unit sales of the z 60 553 6 4415 2 Ilgs are pretty near the same as those z 60 543 1 6003 2 of the z 120 6 543 1 6003 2 at four percent of the z 60 532 6 1 004 2 total computer market These figures z 60 522 1 858 2 are from z 176 9 522 1 858 2 a pretty z 60 511 6 7134 2 much pro IBM trade journal that is a z 60 501 1 01079 2 great way to keep score of just who is z 60 490 6 1 25 2 doing what to whom z 70 480 1 2 5 2424 Apple is sending you conflicting z 60 469 6 1 073 2 signals They have just upgraded the z 60 459 1 2 5 2583 Ilgs operating system and are now z 60 448 6 1191 2 agressively hiring a big bunch of new z 60 438 1 2 5 2932 top quality Apple II people Apple z 60 427 6 1 141 2 IIc Ile and Ilgs end user and devel z 60 417 1 6233 2 oper support is far and away the best z 60 406 6 1 494 2 it has ever been The same goes for z 60 396 1 2 5
97. that is open to professionals in this field Contact them directly for more info After several recent My IIgs blew up calls I thought I d better repeat this warning once again Do NOT under any circumstances attach or remove a disk drive from or to a powered IIgs This is almost certainly guaranteed to blow up both the drive and the motherboard Remember also that the IIgs has a half minute run down time Leave the power off for at least one minute before attaching or removing a drive Note that the printer connections usually can be removed or remade at any time and you probably can get away with removing or replacing a video or monitor cable under power But disk drives are a no no This month s horror story involves several epsilon minuses who are now buying up the old LaserWriter boards and destroying them just to get the valuable dynamic RAM chips out of them This is sort of like all those kids that were stealing accounts re ceivable disks from businesses and reselling them at a buck apiece Once again an old LaserWriter board will drop into an old Laserjet machine giving you a full PostScript printer for under 1300 See last month s column for details Addison Wesley came out with a new orange book called Real World PostScript This one includes font modifications program design half toning layout tips color seperations and several other topics While it is interesting and useful it is simply no
98. the Developer Tools Direct program The twin spectres of limited stock ing of third party products and the limited availability to non developers do seem to be rearing both of their ugly heads Time will tell us whether this move is for better or for worse There is now an unbelievably vile atrocity included free with the new GS OS operating system that renders it utterly and totally useless You can not reset into an application not even into APW As a sadistic side effect a reset can trash open files Such arrogance and stupidity has no place whatsoever in the Apple II universe Whichever epsilon minus dreamed this one up should be staked to an anthill Real soon like When will they ever learn Do NOT under any circumstances use GS OS for anything ever until such time as an absolute and totally unconditional to the program reset is permanantly and acceptably restored Be sure to rush me any temporary fixes on this The IIgs is now dead in the water and likely to stay that way unless something gets done fast Meanwhile Apple does have one all around good deal involving the CD ROM optical disks They will now line you up with several third parties who will custom master your own personal optical CD ROM disks for you at an unbelievable price of only 15 each And there are only three rather small gotchas You do have to buy 100 identical disks at once You are limited to a paltry 80 megabytes max per disk And this
99. they now have an extensive new techncal literature catalog Some of their available free publications do appear in figure one Meanwhile lots is happening on the toner cartridge reloading front Several third party people are now intensely attacking the high costs and the limited refillability of those SX cartridges as demanded by the new Laser Writers Both the new NT and NTX Laser Writers still have an insanely higher per page toner cost for most users than do the older LaserWriters The latest refilling secret is to find a beastie called a 3 Unibit made by Vise Grip and available from Jensen Tools as well as most larger hard ware stores This dude lets you drill rather than melt the refilling holes in either the SX or CX cartridges Tips on Writing PostScript Language Drivers POST01 An Optimization Case Study POST02 How to Avoid Device Specific PostScript Programs POST03 Simple Text Setting Calculations for PostScript Output POST04 PostScript Language Supplement POST05 Screen Fonts Licensing FONT01 AFM Interchange Format for PostScript Font Metrics FONT02 Supporting Downloadable PostScript Fonts FONTO03 ABF Files Binary Format for PostScript Screen Fonts FONT04 Macintosh FONT Resources FONT 05 Document Structuring Conventions 2 0 FORM01 Encapsulated PostScript File Format FORM02 PostScript Printer Description File Specification FORM03 Adobe Illustrator Document Specifications FORM04
100. three stages will not hack it I want to spread out the spaces as far cl startgonzo esc stringmacro S commands Callout center justify Use as xpos ypos message cc when not scanning The centering is done on xpos and txtwide is ignored Callout fill justify Use as xpos ypos message cf when not scanning Uses xpos left margin txwide width Callout left justify Use as xpos ypos message cc when not scanning Uses xpos left margin txwide width Callout right justify Use as xpos ypos message cc when not scanning The right margin is set by xpos and txwide is ignored Begins gonzo scanning of text that follows esc g may also be used Terminates on end of file or esc x User defined embeddable escape commands and macro commands See figure four for the current list A shorthand way of building macros For instance amacro Cyz3 stringmacro def does an esc C esc y esc z esc 3 all on a single esc a embedded Fig 3 Semeriaaportant gonzo commands and variables vtop 44 5 variables ASK THE GURU as I have to Later on some post justification editing can be used to return all the spacing back down to acceptable values I want the speed to not signif icantly slow down the LaserWriter NTX for simplier page layouts and I want the ability to compile all the PostScript code back to the host for the fastest possible book on
101. timing interval ends when the capacitor reaches a preset value By measuring the charging time you can relate the paddle or joystick position to a number in the range of 0 255 Automatic paddle measurement is done from Basic with an X PDL 0 or Y PDL 1 From machine langu age a JSR FB1E will read the pad dle number whose value is in the X register at the time of the subroutine call An 00 to FF value is returned in the accumulator One gotcha if you do try to read successive paddles too close together in machine language you will get some interaction Always be sure to wait several milliseconds before any successive paddle reads Applesloth Basic is so slow that it automatically does this for you Yes you can modify your game paddles The H Ile and IIgs give you a third and fourth paddle input and a third pushbutton input You can also fake a fourth pushbutton input with an extra wire on the H or Ile by jumpering to the output of the cassette read comparator To write your own routines for say an A D converter or for extra resolution you can use BIT C070 to reset the paddle circuitry and a BIT C064 to sense paddle zero or else a BIT CO65 to sense paddle one It is also possible to use the paddle inputs as plain old logic or push button inputs that are compatible with any model Apple This is a tad on the slow side since you have a high capacitance input and need a delay to verify your input but it
102. unprotected stock and standard PostScript text file named IWEM and 2 Each time that you begin printing a new document a single PostScript command _WDJ_ is always sent out as the first printer instruction A summary of IWEM does appear in figure one This is an absolutely January 1988 straight adaption of Adobe s generic daisywheel driver customized for the Imagewriter That mysterious _WDJ_ initializing command is used to turn on a dictionary and start the actual emulation for each job Very handily the emulation does end with each file printing and returns on back to native PostScript So to get sneaky all you have to do is rearrange IWEM to suit your self Make a backup copy of your system disk and plainly label it as modified Then rename IWEM as IWEM ORIG Grab IWEM ORIG with AppleWriter fix it and save it back as IWEM Then label the change You can do anything you like here but remember that the first command that will be sent to the LaserWriter will always be named _WDJ_ Any new IWEM routine absolutely must do a persistent download of some thing that is named _WDJ_ Figure two does show you how to convert IWEM into a workable clone of SEND PS All that I have done here is renamed the old _WBJ_ proc as imagewriter and then defined a new dummy _WBJ_ procedure that does nothing at all With your newly modified IWEM everything sent to the LaserWriter is assumed to be PostScript and gets handled as Po
103. we have this great PostScript BBS going on at 409 244 4074 Meanwhile you can write or call for a new brochure or two that I have put together This month I ve cracked some but not all of the IIgs AppleTalk secrets so let s have at it How Does AppleTalk Work on a IIgs There has long been a dearth of information on the AppleTalk drivers for the IIgs Some resources I have found useful are the original Inside AppleTalk notebook chapter six of a very obscure document known as the Cortland Preliminary Notes and the AppleTalk PEEK Mac program You can check A P D A for all the latest IIgs and AppleTalk tech info The PEEK program uses a second computer to sit on the line and sniff the fumes on ther way by It is most handy as a debugging tool and to find out what is really going on Three AppleTalk drivers are now supplied with release 2 0 of the IIgs system software These three drivers are for the Imagewriter under Apple Talk for a non existent file server and for the LaserWriter The drivers are installed by using the IIgs Apple Talk Chooser II accessory I guess I was most interested in the LaserWriter driver I much prefer using straight serial connections with the LaserWriter since this is simpler cheaper more flexible and often faster than using AppleTalk But you might want to go the AppleTalk route if a IIgs or two and a Mac or two are going to share the same printer In its unaltered form this s
104. while those white write systems produce much lighter grays than you would expect Canon seems to have eased the black write hassles with its second generation SX engine as used in the new LaserJets This most likely was accomplished through a squarer spot special modulation techniques and a high energy toner formula The bottom line here My personal opinion is that most of the existing black write systems are far and away the better choice for most users most of the time As the improved engines become available that use squarer spots the differences between the two should eventually vanish What is this Month s Postscript Utility Hmmmm Stan Veit does keep on threatening to throw several of his alligators into one of my tinajas if I don t start getting this column out on time I have got bunches of not quite prime time Postscript stuff just sitting here in the wings Stuff like a full perspective that even includes the lettering printed circuit layouts compiling tricks that dramatically speed up Postscript and a brand new set of utilities for most any host computer The trouble is they are all pretty nigh but not plumb Let me know if you are personally interested in any zeta testing Instead this month we ll go back to one of my old favorites This is my 34 3 automatic DIP pictorial drawing rou tine Figure three shows you a typical integrated circuit as is used in an electronic s
105. yeah Some epsilon minus left the strobe line off the IIgs game paddle port Contrary to the manuals it is just plain not there Which will severely limit some of the neat hard ware expansion tricks that were easy to pull on the H and He On the other hand if nobody noticed it for two years The good folks at Adobe Systems are up to all sorts of neat stuff First expect a total reworking of the Post Script ROM chips real soon now Which should give you yet another dramatic speed up Their experience with their new display PostScript did show them several profound new tricks they could pull to reduce both the number and the intensity of the interpretive trips through the code Presumably upgrade kits will soon be made available similar to all of the previous ones More details on this as they evolve PostScript has continuously been speeding up at roughly thirty percent per year These days most of that slowness still blamed on PostScript is really caused by such things as the ridiculous communications overhead especially AppleTalk the poor pro gramming stupid host protocols and other dumb stuff like this Adobe has also formed a new third party developers group modeled along the lines of all those certified The LAN of the eighties IIgs numeric tool listing Restoring ProDOS disks Corner rounding punches Laser personal map cards developer programs of Apple and Microsoft Also as figure one shows us
106. 0 0 8 0 0 makefont setfont def namesperpage 30 def colcheck def sheet81 leftpagenum page 8 def rightpagenum page 1 def leftstartingname 7 namesperpage mul def rightstartingname 0 namesperpage mul def def sheet27 leftpagenum page 2 def rightpagenum page 7 def leftstartingname 1 namesperpage mul def rightstartingname 6 namesperpage mul def def sheet63 leftpagenum page 6 def rightpagenum page 3 def leftstartingname 5 namesperpage mul def rightstartingname 2 namesperpage mul def def sheet45 leftpagenum page 4 def rightpagenum page 5 def leftstartingname 3 namesperpage mul def rightstartingname 4 namesperpage mul def def printnames startwith exch def xpos 1 def ytop 55 2 def yposO ytop def ypos yposO def yinc 0 9 def yshift 56 10 div def 0 0 0332 cc 3 10 xpos ypos brbarray startwith get cl yposO ypos0 yshift sub def ypos yposO def startwith startwith 1 add def repeat yposO ytop def ypos ypos0 def xpos xpos 35 3 div add def repeat def background 25 21 10 setgrid bestgray lightgray 0 7 setgray 0 35 57 57 1 2 0 4 quickboxdraw white 9 57 mt 17 r 15 0 mt 5 r black 35 2 div 56 6 0330BSB Fall 1988 Directory cc gsave bestgray 0 7 setgray black 1 setlinecap 0 2 setlinewidth 35 3 div 0 7 mt 55 u 35 3 div 2 xrpt 0 7 56 10 div 0 5 add mt 33 6 r 56 10 div 9 yrpt grestore def generatethepage createarray save leftsnap exch def background 35 2 div 0 3 leftpagenum cc l
107. 0 3 ORG 0300 usual place 0300 5s 0300 6 FOR III III Ok 0300 Fa 4 0300 8 57600 Baud Print Driver ia 0300 Ons for Apple IIe and IIgs i 0300 10 s 0300 IE o a Version 1 0 0300 03AE 4 0300 1264 a K 0300 p Ke 5 1 20 89 ss 0300 14 PP ana Bt E Stang te 9 6 aka MeNae E O E E eee 0300 IS 3 i 0300 16 Copyright c 1989 by 0300 aNd ake 0300 1853 Don Lancaster and Synergetics 0300 LOG Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 0300 20 s 602 428 4073 K 0300 LEF 4 0300 22s All commercial rights reserved 0300 23 7 0300 24 FOR III II Ok 0300 265 WHAT IT DOES 0300 28 This module outputs serial data to the game 0300 29 paddle ports at an honest 57600 baud DTR 0300 30 handshaking in a simplex mode transmit only 0300 31 is used At present a tone is provided to 0300 32 trace handshaking activity An external driver 0300 33 is needed for true bipolar RS 232 0300 3 5 45 HOW TO USE IT 0300 37 To use store the character to be output at 0300 38 55 0303 and JSR 0300 From BASIC POKE char 0300 39 to 771 and then CALL 768 0300 40 0300 42 GOTCHAS 0300 44 Three game paddle port pins are needed 0300 a5 3 0300 46 Ground on game paddle pin 8 0300 47 which becomes RS232 25 pin 7 0300 48 0300 49 Data out on game paddle pin 15 0300 5 0 33 which becomes RS232 25 pin 3 0300 51 0300 52 DTR Busy in on game paddle pin 4
108. 07 SchReset 0907 SchAddTask 0207 SchStartUp 0407 SchVersion 0607 SchStatus 0A07 SchFlush ct ee ee eee eee eee eee TOOL 08 SOUND MANAGER 0108 SoundBootInit 0608 SoundToolStatus 0D08 SetSoundVolume 1208 SetSoundMIROV 0208 SoundStartUp 0908 WriteRamBlock 0E08 FFStartSound 1308 SetUserSoundIROV 0308 SoundShutDown 0A08 ReadRamBlock SOFO8 FFStopSound 1408 FFSoundDoneStatus 0408 SoundVersion 0B08 GetTableAddress 1008 FFSoundStatus 0508 SoundReset 0C08 GetSoundVolume 1108 FFGeneratorStatus wt ee eee eee eee eee TOOL 09 DESKTOP BUS 0109 ADBBootInit 0609 ADBStatus 0E09 SyncADNReceive 1309 SetAbsScale 0209 ADBStartUp 0909 SendInfo 0F09 AbsOn 1409 SRQPoll 0309 ADBShutDown 0A09 ReadKeyMicroData 1009 AdsoOff 1509 SRQRemove 0409 ADBVersion 0B09 ReadKeyMicroMem 1109 ReadAbs 1609 ClearSROQTable 0509 ADBReset 0D09 AsyncaADBReceive 1209 GetAbsScale wt ee eee ee eee eee ee eens TOOL 0A SANE TOOLSET 010A SANEBootInit 040A SANEVersion 060A SANEStatus SOAQA SANEDecStr816 020A SANEStartup 050A SANEReset SO90A SANEFP816 SOBOA SANEElems816 030A SANEShutDown wt er ee eee eee eee ee TOOL 0B INTEGER MATH TOOLS 010B IMBootInit SOEOB FixRatio 190B LoWord 240B Hex2Int 020B IMStartUp SOFOB FixMul 1A0B Long2Fix 250B Hex2Long 030B
109. 09 2C 63 CO 93 HS BIT BUSY 7Check handshaking Fig 2a EDASM source code for a 57600 baud serial driver XN into a document d a powerful and flexible key glossary system e a supervisory language that gives you auto help screens accepts multiple user inputs and automatically writes PostScript code for you especially font selections with user selectable height and width f the same or a similar supervisor that lets you print any left or right pages in any desired order and otherwise control the auto matic font dictionary and prolog downloads and otherwise handle job management g everything open unlocked understood and freely modifiable on any and all levels h forces no unwanted carriage returns line feeds or any format commands ever and finally i a total freedom from being forced into unnatural acts with small furry rodents I will admit that one of the editor programs over on the VAX did seem to remotely approach AppleWriter Until of course you used WPL for auto downloads for anamorphic font selections and for total print man agement Then it was all over but the shouting No contest If you can think of any way at all to meet these needs on a Mac or a 386 that is as fast as powerful and as convenient as is ProDos AppleWriter on a Ile please be certain to let me know A free Incredible Secret Mon ey Machine for your trouble Apple Computer is up to all sorts of neat new stuff First
110. 160 def widthhold boxwide sub 15 sub boxwide 80 80 4 1 5 grabbox bb bt bh sub def boxpath gsave 1 setgray fill grestore gsave 4 setlinewidth stroke grestore gsave 2 5 setlinewidth nuisance begin lightgray end stroke grestore newpath gsave bl 23 moveto 0 99 setgray 4 5 setlinewidth 0 setlinecap 5 0 rlineto stroke br 23 moveto 0 99 setgray 4 5 setlinewidth 0 setlinecap 5 0 rlineto stroke grestore yinc 12 def bw 2 div bl add 61 blurb keystoneshow cck cc ifelse grestore leftmargin coltop 15 add moveto widthhold 0 rlineto 1 setlinewidth stroke leftmargin coltop 15 add 16 add moveto widthhold 0 rlineto 0 5 setlinewidth stroke rightpage 0 0 0332 0331 cc leftmargin widthhold add coltop 15 add 4 add date cer leftmargin coltop 15 add 4 add 0332 0331Hardware Hacker cl ifelse ifelse def footer leftmargin colbot 12 sub moveto widthhold 0 rlineto 0 5 setlinewidth stroke gsave leftmargin rightpage widthhold 35 sub add 35 add ifelse colbot 12 sub translate newpath 17 34 7 14 3 0 5 grabbox bb bt bh sub def boxpath gsave 1 setgray fill grestore stroke 00 0332 0331 cc 0 3 5 pagenum cc grestore def boilerplate widthhold colspace 2 mul txtwide add def save bsnap exch def fontO Palatino Bold findfont 30 0 0 30 0 0 makefont setfont def font1 Palatino Bold findfont 12 0 0 12 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 Palatino Bold findfont 10 0 0 10 0 0 makefont setfont def header footer clear bsnap restore titlepage tadj 50 yinc
111. 19108 716 475 2549 312 726 2802 215 238 5300 Graphic Arts Monthly Plan amp Print Type World 875 Third Avenue 9931 Franklin Avenue 15 Oakridge Circle New York City NY 10022 Franklin Park IL 60131 Wilmington MA 01887 212 605 9400 312 671 5356 617 658 6876 Graphic Arts Product News Print U amp lc 29 North Wacker Drive 355 Lexington Avenue 2 Hammarskjold Plaza Chicago IL 60606 New York City NY 10017 New York NY 10017 312 726 2802 212 682 0830 212 371 0699 Fig 3 Some printing and printshop resources A to date if you ignore all the costs So if you have access to an Apple educational or developer discount or if you are spending someone else s money then the NTX is far and away the one to buy Otherwise that NEC LC 890 represents a very good and very economical choice Incidentally the NeXT hype about their 2000 PostScript printer is just that To build a NeXT printer you just take an already brain dead 1400 street price LaserJet and then remove some electronic components from it When you have display PostScript in your host you can get away with use of a brain dead engine So long as you don t mind tying up your host Anyway on to the big NTX roast Figure two shows you some of the main defects in this machine that I have run across You can judge how important these are to yourself I feel that the real NTX killer is the 15 1 difference in the per page toner costs between it and a
112. 30E WindShutDown DragWindow S2FOE GetContentRgn 430E SetMaxgrow 040E WindVersion GrowWindow S300E GetUpdateRgn S440E GetScroll SO50E WindReset SizeWindow 310E GetDefProc 450E SetScroll SO60E WindStatus TaskMaster 320E SetDefProc S460E GetPage 090E NewWindow EndUpdate 330E GetWControls S470E SetPage 0A0E CheckUpdate BeginUpdate 340E SetOriginMask 480E GetContentDraw SOBOE CloseWindow GetWMgrPort 350E GetInfoRefCon S 490E SetContentDraw SOCOE Desktop PinRect 360E SetInfoRefCon S4A0E GetInfoDraw SODOE SetWTitle HiLiteWindow 370E GetZoomRect S4BOE SetSysWindow SOEOE GetWTitle ShowWide 380E SetZoomrect S4COE GetSysWFlag SOFOE SetFrameColor BringToFront 390E RefreshDesktop S4D0E StartDrawing 100E GetFrameColor WindNewRes S3A0E InvalRect 4E0E SetWindowIcons 110E SelectWindow Trackzoom S3BOE InvalRgn S4FOE GetRectInfo 120E HideWindow S 270E ZoomWindow 3COE ValidRect 500E StartInfoDrawing 130E ShowWindow S 280E SetWRefCon S3D0E ValidRgn 510E EndInfoDrawing 140E SendBehind 290E GetWRefCon S3EOE GetContentOrigin 520E GetFirstWindow 150E FrontWindow S2A0E GetNextWindow S3FOE SetContentOrigin 530E WinddragRect 160E SetInfoDraw S2BOE GetWKind S400E GetDataSize 560E WindowGlobal 170E FindWindow 2COE GetWFrame Fig 3 Numeric order list of Ilgs tools part 2 J 41 3 ASK THE GURU ProDOS disk The better you get at this the bigger a hero you ll bec
113. 5 1 4 disk can be written while a closed window on a 3 1 2 is also unsafe You should now make the best bit copy backup you can of the original disk Don t EVER attempt to recon struct the actual bad disk Instead always work on a bit copied backup Then try using a disk recovery utility such as Fixcat from Bag of Tricks Since catalog tracks are the ones most often written to they tend to blow up the most often If all else fails a partial manual re covery may be all that s left to try To get started load up a Zap utility or some other program that lets you read and write valid ProDOS blocks Then carefully go through the entire backup disk by hand reading each and every block by hand and taking lots of notes on everything you find First find out the bad blocks that will not even read List each of these You will have to patch your way around these and you can probably write off any data present unless you go to some very exotic tools Next be on the lookout for key blocks A key block will have mostly zeros Most often it will start out with a sequence such as 34 36 37 38 39 3A 00 00 00 These are the blocks where the file will reside The high block number byte is 256 locations further along The high byte will often be 00 Once you have a key block try to figure out what type of file it is and how important it is that you recover it In general you only want to try and recover what is essential
114. 57 showgrid if bestgray lightgray 0 7 setgray 4 5 26 40 11 1 2 0 4 quickboxdraw black yinc 2 def 17 5 36 blurbtext cc clear rightsnap restore createarray save leftsnap exch def 11 72 mul 2 div 0 translate background printnames clear leftsnap restore def delimiter YAAA def createarray 1000 array brbarray exch def pointer 0 def 0 1 999 brbarray exch put for brblist delimiter search brbarray exch pointer exch put pointer pointer 1 add def pop exit ifelse loop def blurbtext 0330Your Fall 1988 B R B Directory Meeting Notice And Call For Papers def brblist Aaron A Aardvark 1 First Avenue Alton AL 32768 101 111 1101 AM82 M84 Exp 1 1 90 YAAA Byron B Benson 2 Boyd Boulevard Bismark CA 22021 202 222 2202 M87 88 Dues not paid YAA A This continues for up to 240 names YAAA Zack Zimmerman 99999 Zoraster Trail Zion UT 99909 999 999 9909 FM86 M88 Exp 1 1 94 YAAA YAAA def add handfeed here if wanted ofnamestoprint 300 def generatethepage Fig 5 Intelligent Directory Auto Addressing Cover Ne 7 How Do I get Started Using PostScript As should be ridiculously obvious by now PostScript is the best way of combining text and graphics into useful page descriptions for laser printers and phototypesetters Back to all of the fundamentals PostScript is a universal and general purpose computer language that is distantly related to Forth It excels at graphics and text page
115. 8 502 584 1239 312 421 3373 Disabled Technical Center Technology Resources 5759 Hedgehaven Court 3023 Canterbury Las Vegas NV 89120 Salina KS 67401 702 382 3358 913 827 0301 Handi Ham System Trace Development Center 3915 Golden Valley Road 1500 Highland Avenue Golden Valley MN 55422 Madison WI 53705 612 588 0811 608 262 6966 Fig 2 Some technical resources for the handicapped J 42 2 ASK THE Va 01 02 03 04 05 06 09 SOA 0B 01 02 03 04 01 02 01 02 03 04 05 06 09 01 02 03 04 05 06 09 SOA 01 02 03 04 05 06 09 SOA 0B SOC 0D SOE SOF ooutemee tae ee ee eet a TOOL 14 LINE 110F GetSysBar 1F0F SetMenuFlag 120F SetSysBar 210F SetMenuTitle 130F FixMenuMItem 200F GetMenuFlag 140F CountMItems 220F GetMenuTitle 150F NewMenuBar 230F MenuGlobal 160F GetMHandle 240F SetMItem 170F SetBarColor 250F GetMItem 180F GetBarColors 260F SetMItemFlag 190F SetMTitleStart 270F GetMItemFlag 1A0F GetMTitleStart 280F SetMItemBlink S1BOF GetMenuMgrPort 290F MenuNewRes 1C0F CalcMenuSize 2A0F DrawMenuBar 1D0F SetMTitleWidth 2B0F MenuSelect S1EOF GetMTitleWidth 2COF HiliteMenu TOOL 10 CONTROL MANAGER 0C10 SetCtiTitle 1510 TrackControl 0D10 GetCtiTitle 1610 MoveControl 0E10 GrowSize 1710 DragControl 0F10 ShowControl 1810 SetCtliIcons 1010 DrawControls 1910 S
116. 9d90343d8da484f02fa5b59365c94b678044f9098 Sea userdict RD string currentf ile exch readstring pop executeo nly put userdict ND noaccess def executeonly put dup Private 8 d Fig 7 How to sight read a PostScript eexec file N 43 5 of the eexec files With some patience eexec files can be directly sight read without needing anything fancy in the way of insider knowledge or exotic tools Everything you need is right there in the red and blue and green books There are compelling and over whelming advantages to converting all of your downloadable fonts into ordinary textfiles Once converted they often will store in less than half the space and download in less than half the time You can now create short fonts where you only need a few special characters for an often used logo or label You can also now add or modify any character anywhere in the font while rearranging the scenery to suit yourself Or extract character shapes for special uses Such things as the complement bars needed for elec tronic text are now easily done You can also now do the true perspective 3 D and other specialized font transformations much faster than you could by using the slow pixel line remapping that was demanded by eexec format files At any rate figure seven shows you how to sight read an eexec file What you do is get into a two way communicating environment using an error trapper that can dump the stack dum
117. AE IDET 60 l or do t it t nsanely expensive Na y des gin often be replaced by a ange i tod cable or even by Mee y piete85of3 doorbell wire twisted Gbaager4F85 13 And they piek AWD fase to admit that AppleWriter runs just fine on the IIgs once those three byte patches arg made that I ve on rerun heras RAYRAB SNS A E000 Or better yet go back to using a Super Serial Card That IIgs serial firmware rehQG HAWLEY Problems than it solves Many other programs will also work just fine with a Super Serial Card but will hang with the IIgs internal serial firmware Just be sure to select your card from your control panel This also will bypass many of the IIgs print buffering has sles and incompatibilities Outside of these many grevious problems Tech Tidbits does seem to be very slowly cleaning up their act Someday eventually they just might even became a useful resourse Here FRO On d Xcerpts from them The quickest way to identify the new IIc or new Ile ROM upgrade is to type a CALL 151 followed by a exclamation point If the prompt changes to then you have dropped into the mini assembler and have your new chips installed Fig 3 Adding an emptying hole to a CX toner cartridge S 38 2 ASK THE GURU a N picture LEFT plane endpoint in space observer ETR _ yo xx xo yo yy xO center of picture plane picture UP plane endpoint in
118. Apple Mac or IBM is available for 39 50 Spirograph routines Emulates epicycloids and hypoclycoids that have a variable length pen arm similar to super spirograph toys To use translate to desired position Then define stator teeth a rotor teeth b the number of total revolutions maxang resolution in degrees Ires and the ratio of the pen arm length to the rotor teeth penarm Use positive b values for inside hypocycloids and negative b values for outside epicycloids penarm normaly ranges from 0 to 1 cposn ang exch def a b sub ang cos mul a b sub b div ang mul cos b mul penarm mul add a b sub ang sin mul a b sub b div ang mul sin b mul penarm drawspiro newpath a b 1 penarm sub mul sub 0 moveto 0 res maxang 360 mul cvi cposn lineto currentpoint stroke moveto for def a 96 def b 75 def maxang 32 def res 10 def penarm 0 8 def drawspiro a 96 def b 15 def maxang 32 def res 1 def penarm 1 def drawspiro Fig 5 PostScript code for the ultimate bagel or on the wall if you prefer use for PostScript laser printed Pellon There will be the usual Incredible Secret Money Machine book prizes for the top twenty or so entries with an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two awarded to the very best of all What is This Month s PostScript Utility Well actually it is not ready yet I was hoping to give to you another major and secret blockbuster for this m
119. E 033 embedded escape makeitbig true def setscale headertitle O338Lancaster Ask the Guru Column 46 def pagenum 2 def dropindent 36 def llill ACTUAL TEXT STARTS HERE header startgonzo 033a B 033b oy a whole flock of them flew over that time Apple has finally and officially flushed Pascal Pascal was basically a laboratory animal that escaped Unfortunately it did do an incredible and incalculable amount of damage to both academia and general computer literacy well before its long overdue extermination 033p The heir apparent would seem to be the 0334 C 0331 language helped along with closely linked and tightly writ ten assembly language modules The 0334APW 0331 development system on the Ilgs and the 0O334MPW 0331 development system on the Mac are good places to start using 0334 C 0331 Both of these are now available through 0334APDA 0331 What about 0334UNIX 0331 or 0334A UX 0331 While 0334UNIX 0331 is written in 0334 C 0331 personally feel that a It is insanely bloated b It is already hopelessly obsolete and c anything that 0334AT amp T 0331 is in favor of has got to be suspect Let s see There is a new version 03343 2 0331 system master disk for the Ilgs More on this shortly The bottom line is that the printer driver improve ments are far too little done far too late but that there s lots of other neat stuff included in the upgrade Quite a few of you helpline ca
120. ESetCarat DetNextDIitem ModalDialog2 GetDItemValue SetDItemValue GetNewModalDialog GetNewDItem GetAlertStage ResetAlertStage DefaultFilter GetDefButton SetDefButton DisableDItem EnableDItem 42 3 similar to the Vaporlock that did appear in my Enhance II An exact screen lock opens up all sorts of new video possibilities What kinds of new possibilities Why don t you show me For this month s contest just tell me about some new sneaky or mind blowing thing you can do with an exact or a partial software video lock We ll have all of those usual Incredible Secret Money Machine book prizes for the best two dozen entries and an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two for the very best entry of all One tip be certain to defeat any and all interrupts during the time an exact screen lock is set up or some very wierd results may happen What Technical Resources are Available for the Handicapped The personal computer has been the great equalizer for the handi capped and we sure get lots of help line calls on this topic Figure two lists many of the organizations and resources involving special education and therapy Both Apple and Tandy have quite excellent special education contacts and resources available as do many local ham radio clubs As with just about any other field the resources are there all you have to do is dig into them on your own All it takes is
121. F 08 78 2C 58 CO 2C 53 CO 10 FB 2C 30 lt cr gt 0310 CO AD 36 CO 48 29 7F 8D 36 CO AD 03 03 2C 59 CO lt cr gt 0320 48 68 6A 90 09 BO 00 2C 58 CO BO 00 BO 08 EA 2C lt cr gt 0330 59 CO 90 00 90 00 6A 90 07 BO 00 2C 58 CO BO 06 lt cr gt 0340 EA 2C 59 CO 90 00 EA EA 6A 90 07 BO 00 2C 58 CO lt cr gt 0350 BO 06 EA 2C 59 CO 90 00 EA EA 6A 90 07 BO 00 2C lt cr gt 0360 58 CO BO 06 EA 2C 59 CO 90 00 EA EA 6A 90 09 BO lt cr gt 0370 00 2C 58 CO BO 00 BO 08 EA 2C 59 CO 90 00 90 00 lt cr gt 0380 6A 90 07 BO 00 2C 58 CO BO 06 EA 2C 59 CO 90 00 lt cr gt 0390 EA EA 6A 90 07 BO 00 2C 58 CO BO 06 EA 2C 59 CO lt cr gt 03A0 90 00 48 68 EA EA 2C 58 CO 68 8D 36 CO 28 60 11 lt cr gt 3 Do a 300LLLL and compare the listing against figure two 4 Do a BSAVE BAUD 57600 A 0300 L AF to save the code to disk 5 To install at run time do a BLOAD BAUD 57600 Fig 3 Hand loading your 57600 baud object code driver S J The process works just fine on a H Ile or Hgs You use the game paddle output as a RS 232 or RS 423 driver One possible cable schematic appears in figure one The maximum recommended cable length is five feet unless you add suitable drivers Plans are underfoot to offer this cable or cable kits through the folks at Redmound Cable Give them a call for more details Source code for a suitable software driver appears in figure two Annunc iator ANO is used for data out since reset of a Ile or IIgs drive
122. FE0000000 SUOQQ0000FFFFFF00000007F800 O00003FFFFFF8000000 F8O0Q000001FFFFFFFCOO0001FF800 O0007FFFFFFFE000003 8000003FFFFFFFFFCOO01FFF800 OOO7FFFFFFFFFFOO03F DOOO3FFFFFFFC7FFFFFFFFF800 OOFFFFFFFF83FFFFFFF PO7TFFFFFFFCOIFFFFFFFFFO00 OFFFFFFFFOOLFFFFFFF FFFFFFF8000FFFFFFFFE000 FFFFFFFFOOOO7FFFFFF FFFF800001FFFFFFFC000 FFFFFFE000001FFFFFF FF00000007FFFFFF0000 FFFFFE00000001FFFFF g0000000003FFFF00000 FFFFC00000000007FFC g000000000000000000 FFFC000000000000000 amp 00000000000000000 FFC0000000000000000 wo 000000000000000 FE0000000000000000G p0000000000000 FC00000000000 epee 0000000000 00000000000 00000000000004 p000000000008 P0000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 gt def Both normal and greatly magnified results are shown above The magnification is ratty looking since you are viewing all of the individual pixels magnified by a factor of 10X Fig 5 Converting a scanmap to a bitmap PEREPERE FFFFFFFFFFFE FFFFFFFFFFFFE FEFFFEFEFFEEF 00000000000003 0000000000000 0001F 80000000 100000000003 000000000000 00000000000008 000000000000008 Here s one way to show the bitmap gsave 200 300 translate 96 72 mul 300 div dup scale 90 rotate true 96 0 0 96 0 0 Rbitmap imagemask grestore 48
123. First the auxproc elements go down These are overwritten by the main proc elements which in turn will get themselves overwritten by the four cornerproc elements Figures four and five give you two ready to run examples for some typical borders The scroll border May 1988 shown is particularly useful for any certificates and awards After you have defined a few borderprocs of your own you might want to place them into a PostScript dictionary where they can called out by a single literal name Some intelligent adjustments have to be made internally by the magic border machine On some borders particularly those with only a few elements on each side the border procs might end up slightly squashed or stretched out The border machine reports a squashticity factor back to the host The optimum squashticity is 1 0 In rare instances it might be necessary to slightly adjust the over all border height or width in order to get an acceptable squashticity Squashticity problems are utterly negligible for most popular border designs especially if there are lots of elements on each side The squash ticity factor is strictly a fine tuning tool for perfectionists This border routine is intended for symmetric borders that rotate as you go around them Another related routine is available for plain borders whose elements all point in the same direction For instance valentine hearts look kinda stupid when shown sideways or
124. I have been particularly impressed with the many offerings from Shreve Systems Let s see I just got word on a low cost replacement for the Kroy Kolor machine that is based on the widely discounted Canon fuser unit More details in a future column Adobe Systems has finally released the green book Which is volume three in their PostScript program ming series Yes I do have copies on hand here if you cannot find them locally This volume is on PostScript program design and has plenty of hands on detailed examples in it And yes my new LaserWriter NTX finally showed up But not in time for a thorough test and review this month Some quick answers Yes this is an absolutely outstan ding machine that should define what laser printing should and will be for the next several years Yes each of those predicted major problems we looked at last month exist and are for real Yes there is at least a 2 1 speedup provided you do not let AppleTalk or your application program get in the way In some cases the speedup can and will end up negligible Yes the NTX works beautifully with the IBM clones and every other host computer under the sun Various hand shaking options are now both switch and software selectable No the AppleTalk network is most definitely NOT needed to use this great machine In fact it often will 40 1 June 1988 N st eee ee eee e
125. Let s assume you had a giant plane of glass lying between you and your subject We ll call this pane of glass our picture plane We will start an origin at the center bottom of the picture plane We ll use xx for the back and forth distance with right positive We ll then make yy the distance into the picture with the farther from you being more positive And we will use zz for up and down with positive up Next we will assume you will be standing pretty far out in front of the picture plane We can call xo yo and zo the distance from the plane to your eyeball In general for the two point perspective to work you will want to stand fairly far back using a rather large yo Otherwise your perspective illusion might distort and fail Many times you might want your zo to match a standard eyeball height par ticularly on architectural drawings We ll call capital X the back and forth distance on both the final paper and your picture plane and capital Y the up and down distance on the paper and the plane As figures six and seven show us two simple and similar traingles are all that is needed to transform your perspective image to the final page All that my routines or your new computer programs have to do is solve these similar triangles for each and every endpoint of each and every line to be drawn While rather painful for a people this is totally and utterly trivial for a computer Give me a call if you do n
126. SYSTEM 1 3 flaws More on that NTX hard disk Simple template for newsletters 300 DPI print secrets Apple user resources Pixel line remapping Highresolutionhassles Binding systems review vi Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU November 1987 pple Computer desktop publishing introductions so far this fall have seemed rather low key at least to this writing In mid September they quietly announced a new LaserWriter upgrade to those Version 47 ROM s and adjusted their list price so it no longer is an outright joke The V47 ROM s will execute most routines 33 percent faster They also eliminate some but not all of the nasty bugs in the older Version 38 A list of all the major LaserWriter Version 38 bugs appears in figure one along with some of the work arounds Note that all of the recent LaserWriter s had Version 38 ROM s in them the only difference with the Plus was a few extra resident fonts Apple has also quietly shown a new godzilla style laser printer to a few selected parties in hotel rooms across the country Presumably this is a 300 600 DPI machine using a 68030 does some 20 copies per minute and comes with a built in hard disk Up to 11 x 17 inch paper Possibly a super secret new Canon JX or ZX engine PostScript of course Apple also has come out with a 1400 dot matrix printer that seems totally unusable for most serious desktop publishing Actually that 1400 is a low
127. TStatus 1303 DelHeartBeat 1E03 PosMouse 2903 GetIRQEnable 0903 WriteBBRam 1403 ClearHeartBeat 1F03 ServeMouse 2A03 SetAbsClamp 0A03 ReadBRam 1503 SysFailMgr 2003 GetNewID 2B03 GetAbsClamp 0B03 WriteBBParam 1603 GetAddr 2103 DeleteID 2C03 SysBeep 0C03 ReadBParam 1703 ReadMouse 2203 StatusID 0D03 ReadTimeHex 1803 InitMouse 2303 InitSource wt ee eee ee eee eee ee eee TOOL 04 QUICKDRAW 0104 QDBootInit 3804 SetSolidBackPat 6D04 OpenRgn A504 DrawString 0204 QDStartUp 3904 SolidPattern 6E04 CloseRgn SA604 DrawCString 0304 QDShutDown 3A04 MoveTo 6F04 OffsetRgn A704 DrawText 0404 QDVersion 3B04 Move 7004 InsetRgn A804 CharWidth 0504 QDReset 3C04 LineTo 7104 SectRgn SA904 StringWidth 0604 QDStatus 3D04 Line 7204 UnionRgn AA04 CStringWidth 0804 AddPt 3E04 SetPicSave 7304 DiffRgn SABO4 TextWidth 0904 GetAddress 3F04 GetPicSave 7404 XorRgn AC04 CharBounds 0A04 Grafon 4004 SetRgnSave 7504 PtInRgn AD04 StringBounds 0B04 Grafoff 4104 GetRgnSave 7604 RectInRgn AE04 CStringBounds 0C04 GetStandardSCB 4204 SetPolySave 7704 EqualRgn AF04 TextBounds 0D04 InitColorTable 4304 GetPolySave 7804 EmptyRgn B004 SetArcRot 0E04 SetColorTable 4404 SetGrafProcs 7904 FrameRgn B104 GetArcRot 0F04 GetColorTable 4504 GetGrafProcs 7A04 PaintRgn B204 SetSysFont 1004 SetColorEntry 4604 SetUserField 7B04 E
128. The initial list then gets converted to an array of addresses This greatly simplifies finding the initial address for each sub page A sneaky trick is used to do the self addressing Instead of creating your entire mailing cover art over and over again you simply will erase each old name and put a new one down This is insanely faster and runs at the full speed of just about any PostScript printer As shown the code is specific for an eight page directory of up to 240 names It can be easily customized for other lengths or even fully auto mated to produce whatever number of pages the list demands To also give you a chance at a winnable contest just show me any variation at all on the theme of intel ligent and self mailing directories Let me hear from you 46 6 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU PC Transporter first look PostScript intelligent tabs LaserWriter NTX defects list Simple white noise generator January 1989 hat is the future of the Apple IIgs Stan Veit and I have been kicking this around and we are getting a few different answers from several different sources At present the unit sales of the IIgs are pretty near the same as those of the IBM XT at four percent of the total computer market These figures are from Computer Reseller a pretty much pro IBM trade journal that is a great way to keep score of just who is doing what to whom Apple is sending you conflicting signals They
129. VGC chip is only needed if you have a pink stripe in your IIgs display While you can replace the ROM yourself a special tool is needed for the VGC chip The new system ROM demands the revised System 2 0 software disk There are no reports so far of incom patibility problems but naturally they are certain to occur Just to be sure save your old ROM Do not let your dealer steal it Please keep me posted on any compatibility problems Meanwhile there are some really bizarre IIgs bugs newly surfacing By now nearly everybody knows that the it won t print bug can often be temporarily cured by using a Super Serial Card and making sure you select it on the control panel Later on patches can be made to your software to let you use the internal IIgs serial code There is also a glaringly stupid omission over on the IIgs memory expansion connector that prevents you from using DMA on most any third party memory card that has more than 1 Meg of 256K RAM chips or 4 Megs of 1 Meg RAM chips There is no obvious solution to this problem so you can expect really bizarre hassles with any larger third party expansion card Meanwhile there s a really cute bug in the System 2 0 software disk It seems that if you use the launcher otherwise known as the luncher as you may want to get a sandwich while it is playing its games and pick a ProDOS 8 application and then return to ProDOS 16 not all of Pro DOS 16 will get properly
130. WEM code whenever port seven gets init ialized and then trys to force you to 36 4 send all your code in the emulation mode Thus you will get PostScript listings rather than postScript code printed out unless you make some changes real quick like To beat this you simply replace IWEM with any code variation you like while obeying two rules 1 The final code must be named IWEM and 2 there MUST be a procedure some where near the start of IWEM that is defined with the name _WBJ_ To review what happens in the IIgs with an AppleTalk installation IWEM is persistently downloaded to your PostScript speaking laser prin ter if it is not already there Later on PR 7 or another AppleTalk initial activation a single _WBJ_ command is sent out This turns on the image writer emulation mode and locks you out of PostScript Unless of course you properly rearrange the scenery to suit yourself IWEM apparently demands low ASCII input with bit 7 always a zero Thus ProDOS AppleWriter 2 0 will work but 2 1 may not Similarly a simple force low ASCII machine language driver should be used between Applesloth and IWEM This can be done from inside BASIC with a few POKE commands and is left as an exercise for all of you more ser ious students So there What is this Month s PostScript Utility How about a pair of them Figure three shows you all of the sneaky tricks needed to print the open and cl
131. Weitek implementations run as much as five times faster than the high end Apple LaserWriter NTX and do so at a potentially lower cost It s also possible to install a new LaserWriter computer directly into a HP LaserJet A 10 set of easy plans is available from Custom Technol ogy while the LaserWriter boards are sometimes available through Shreve Systems There s two problems with this route The main LaserWriter computer boards are very difficult to find at reasonable prices while the much smaller and also required in terface connector card is just about impossible to pin down There are also some interesting and low cost software only solutions to the LaserJet problem One of these is the Freedom of the Press while a second is GoScript from LaserGo All you helpline callers have been especially enthusiastic over GoScript Besides driving a LaserJet this can even give an Epson dot matrix printer some limited PostScript capabilities and the cost is under 200 Yes most of my PostScript Show and Tell will run under GoScript e e amp o Fd z 2 a 5 2 S 2 S E 2 gt 5 ge as eo 638 3 Be SES oS Bao a E 558 A SES S 3 35 588 283 6sf 2 zzo sera Bea Base Tog ELL o 5532 FENG uagh son arzo Bo 2ze glog San SSS gror
132. Western Design Center with all their 65816 and newer products NCR and MOS Technology who are two of the commodity production houses and Commodore who now have a brand new 6502 in the works that does a 40 percent speedup by use of fewer machine cycles on such things as conditional branches Lots of helpline callers have asked when PostScript will be available for their Imagewriters and similar dot matrix printers Well it turns out there is a UNIX based and public domain British version of display PostScript now kicking around on the va S Heat and pressure fuses ink to re melted toner Omnicrom ink Omnicrom ink and carrier opaque negative Toner original Ink coated toner original Fig 1 How the Omnicrom Kroy Kolor process works J 43 1 Sight reading an eexec file Bad SX cartridge problems Omnicrom and Kroy Kolor Direct input from to Apple Cheap new fusion machine various bulletin boards It s only a matter of time before someone adapts a display PostScript system like this one to one or more low end print ers Two products in the works are GoScript and Freedom of the Press I am in the process of chasing all these down Stay tuned Let s see Yes we do continuously stock Adobe s red blue and green books here at Synergetics These are absolutely essential to any intelligent use of PostScript Start with the blue cookbook While I have bunches of my own PostScript produ
133. a startgcompile where compiling is to first begin endgcompile if compiling is to be stopped optional reportgcompile where returned code is to be reported to host for recording This program works by opening up a new string dictionary for each font used The awidthshow operator is intercepted and each single font string is then written to the appropriate dictionary When finished the full dictionaries are returned to the host for recording using a modest compaction that rounds everything to four decimal places and eliminates leading or trailing zeros The 0 yshift and 32 space are suppressed The output is in the form of n1 n2 n3 n4 text string z where n1 is the horizontal position in points n2 is the vertical position in points n3 is the space stretch n4 is the character stretch text string is the message and z is the decompact proc call The compiled textfile will typically lengthen from 20 to 40 percent while the run time will typically be less than 1 20th that of the uncompiled code startgcompile fontsused 0123456789 def dfontname dfontx def glinenumber 1 def dictsize 500 def stall 100 37 sin pop repeat def createfontdicts fontsused dfontname exch 5 exch put dfontname cvn dictsize dict def forall def divertawidthshow awidthshow dup length 0 gt dfontname 1 fontn putinterval dfontname cvx exec glinenumber evs cvn mark currentpoint 10 index 8 index 7 index mark exch
134. a October 1988 printsubstrings prints or compiles a previously created ssarray array of form string1 D string2 stringn and length ssa Each substring array is in the form spacestretch charstretch wstringstartpointer wstringlengthpointer moveproc mproctrue font If compile is true a compile returns values to the host If compile is false the array is imaged in the normal manner logic and format for currentpoint shift false use existing currentpoint 6 3 rmoveto true execute currentpoint proc 1 2 moveto true execute currentpoint proc compile false def stalltime 20 def compile time delay for host optional stall stalltime 37 sin pop repeat def warning compile not yet fully debugged needs to recognize shifts for rj and cj printsubstrings compile 0 1 ssa 1 sub ssarray exch get aload pop dup 0 ne fontn exch 4 exch put r print flush stall fontn print flush stall r print flush stall pop ifelse 40 string cvs print print flush stall forall r print flush stall if linestring 3 1 roll getinterval schold exch def exch 8 string cvs print flush stall 0 32 print flush stall 8 string cvs print flush stall 0 print flush stall schold print flush stall awidthshow r print flush stall for r print flush 0 1 ssa 1 sub ssarray exch get aload pop dup 0 ne dup fontn 4 get ne fontn exch 4 exch put fontn cvx exec pop ifelse pop ifels
135. a listing of the stock Adobe error trapper that prints the page up to the point where the error is made and then dumps the stack This is also widely available on the various bulletin boards and directly from Adobe Apparently the code is not quite public domain in that Adobe has copyrighted it yet does seek out the widest possible free dissemenation A free copy has also been added to my PostScript Work in Progress disk as a user service Just what can a beginner do with PostScript My desktop publishing course has given me some suprising answers What the students get is a word processor and a couple of my invisible magic files that have been persistently downloaded One of these is my gonzo justify The second is my PostScript utilities And the final one is a nuisance dic tionary inside the utilities that adds all sorts of easy to use commands You can get a free printed listing of these when you phone or write The listings also have appeared in the back issues of Computer Shopper and are all available ready to run on my PostScript Work in Progress disk May 1989 Figure four shows you a two up notepad that you might easily put together This demonstrates how trivially easy bare metal PostScript is The original is in black and a superb high quality gray My step and repeat utilities can automate the two up layout process After printing several dozen pages you clamp them and run two coats of padding compound alo
136. a radiused box with square inside corners and round outside ones This looks best with fairly fat borders If you use a zero brad value then you get perfectly square corners Finally you can use negative values for brad These will give you fancy inverse cusps as shown you in the middle of figure five Your boxes can be repeated inside boxes Make the outside one black and the inside one white and you have a fancy double border similar to the ones that I usually use on my Synergetics ads The boxifier can also be repeated for such things as fancy continuous borders Let me know what else you can come up with on this Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU February 1988 arring any further delays Apple is about to announce a pair of fresh PostScript speaking laser printers The current LaserWriter Plus is being upgraded to use the new Canon SX engine This new engine is far and away the best choice available today for low end laser printing The SX has been designed from the ground up as an actual laser printer rather than being thrown together from recycled copier parts The new SX is smaller more rugged and costs less than the old CX It holds more toner per cartridge and gives much more solid blacks particularly over any larger fill areas The paper path is simpler and less jam prone The trays hold more paper The manual feeding is far easier It collates Envelopes are less of a hassle to print and
137. acline gotacline exit ifelse loop def Fig 4a A fancy three column gonzo auto layout template J 49 4 ASK THE GURU have their collective hearts set on using the seventeenth lousiest gray that is available from their machines Now that may be their trip and more power to them but all this non sense is giving 300 DPI printing a bad name In reality any LaserWriter can give you grays so fine that they look like an india ink wash Figure two once again shows you the LaserWriter secret gray map that reveals to you all of the hidden and all of the vastly better grays Any gray will trade off the number of gray levels shown inside the map against the coarseness or the screen density Screens are only provided for certain angles of tilt as shown along the bottom of the map Since integer arithmetic gets involved and since everything has to tile itself correctly these are the only available grays Should you request a different screen density or angle you l always 4 gt denselisting bc br bl sub 2 div bl add def txtwide bw 10 sub def ybot 99999 def font0 Helvetica Bold findfont 10 0 0 10 0 0 makefont setfont def font1 Helvetica findfont 7 0 0 7 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 Helvetica Oblique findfont 7 0 0 7 0 0 makefont setfont def font3 Helvetica Bold findfont 7 0 0 7 0 0 makefont setfont def font4 Courier findfont 7 0 0 7 0 0 makefont setfont def ypos b
138. adding compound There ll be an Incredible Secret Money Machine for the best twenty entries and an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two for the very best entry Copyright c 1988 by Don Lancaster amp Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal non commercial use permitted so long as this header remains both present and intact Work in Progress disk costs 39 50 quadpixel transform 4 div round 4 mul itransform def setgrid save rubbersnap exch def size exch def quadpixel exch quadpixel exch translate size dup scale def drawlines 72 300 div lw mul size div setlinewidth hposs 0 def hlines gs div 1 add cvi hposs 0 moveto 0 vlines rlineto stroke hposs hposs gs add def repeat vposs 0 def vlines gs div 1 add cvi 0 vposs moveto hlines 0 rlineto stroke vposs vposs gs add def repeat def showgrid gsave vlines exch def hlines exch def 106 45 pop pop 0 setscreen 0 9 setgray gs 1 def Iw 1 def drawlines grestore def 2X 60 72 mul 300 div setgrid def trace20 6 30 div setlinewidth def trace50 16 30 div setlinewidth def trace80 24 30 div setlinewidth def am newpath moveto def tdraw rlineto currentpoint stroke moveto def u 0 exch tdraw def r dup tdraw def r 0 tdraw def r dup neg tdraw def d 0 exch neg tdraw def I neg dup tdraw def l neg 0 tdraw def l dup neg exch tdraw def black 0 setgr
139. al directories Several of my students and quite a few PostScript developers seem most enthuastic over this program But I guess I do have three major problems with this LaserTalk code First while that preview bitmap is really returned to your screen you are prevented from doing anything useful with it As we saw two months ago captured bitmaps can give you as much as a 3000 1 speedup in some PostScript routines especially those involved with perspective 3 D or star wars lettering Thus the bitmap preview feature does not go nearly far enough and thus ends up as a serious disservice to potential users Second I do have to ask myself whether I would personally use this program The answer is probably not since it does nothing that I am not already able to conveniently and routinely do using AppleWriter and WPL on my Ile I always prefer to work with bare metal on a machine where everything is open fully un derstood and freely modifiable LaserTalk would be just one more locked layer getting between me and what I am trying to accomplish Third and by far the worst the LaserTalk software licensing agree ment is so laughingly and ludicrously absurd to the point where no sane individual would ever purchase this program The agreement would not fit on the disk envelope so they had to enlarge to envelope to hold it The thinking behind this software licensing agreement obviously came from spending many long hours in
140. alk schematic Postscript boxifier Laser printing papers New BASIC for the IIgs AppleTalk cable substitutes Monochrome HIRES graphics New LaserWriters Postscript point grid Printing onto aluminum Understanding IIgs modes IIgs programming resources Perspective drawing Help on the Apple III Self publishing secrets Alternate IIgs monitors INH problems on the IIgs A new high tech toy Perspective transforms New LaserWriter details IIgs AppleWriter patches Toner cartridge reloading PostScript border builder IIgs toolset dependencies Getting started with APW Transparent laser printing Stock market price records A Numeric IIgs tool list Using padding compound PostScript printed circuits IIgs old disk drive adaptor Selecting your laser printer The LAN of the eighties IIgs numeric tool listing Restoring ProDOS disks Corner rounding punches Laser personal map cards IIgs numeric toolkit listing An exact IIgs video locking Post justification edit ideas Handicapped tech resources Postscript input text scanner Sight reading an eexec file Bad SX cartridge problems Omnicrom and Kroy Kolor Direct input from to Apple Cheap new fusion machine Duplex color tricks Gonzo Justify Stuff Color proofing systems Anti Scratch Pixie Dust New IIgs System Software Several hot stamping ideas My computer workstations Old and new game paddles Using snoop and superexec PostScript nuisance routine Apple game paddle circuits Las
141. ally putting paren thesis around each text line can get old very fast So far text scanning is no biggie PostScript s getline command works just fine for this And most of those stock emulators are nothing but fancy text scanners in disguise But suppose you want to write an emulator that you can switch into or out of at any time under your own full software control Or suppose you want to make use of PostScript s reverse slash com mands on raw input text files The reverse slash commands normally will work only within internally defined strings Or perhaps you want to handle such printing tasks as using several embedded escape sequences on a host that can only output printable low ASCII characters or has other restrictions to non printing codes Or access all of the 192 Zapf ding bats Or do some sort of automatic character substitution Or maybe you want to read any old data base and convert it into some proportionally spaced yet perfectly aligned columns in a mixture of fonts and different justify modes This new text scanner works by grabbing one input character at a time Those characters are tested to see whether they are an end of line linefeed character the substitution character a reverse slash sequence or an end of scan command If an end of line character then the newly created PostScript line string is passed on to whatever it was that you wanted the string for in the first place It is
142. and bootstraping his way along until he was a millionare CEO head of his own software firm The IIgs did offer us new and more powerful ways of doing some things Included was an incredibly complex toolbox and the ability to use icons We can now do the big machine things that we were never able to do before With outstanding sound and superb graphics But only at a heinous price First it seems that the IIgs usually ends up much slower than the Ile because of the layer upon layer onion effect of all the complex relocatable software involved We have such absurdities as taking 130 microseconds in the 39 3 fast mode on a IIgs to find out if a port character is available to be read compared to only 6 on the Ile And none of the new gee whiz IIgs word processors can even think of holding a candle to good old AppleWriter on a Ile when it comes to no nonsense operating speed and raw power But worst of all is the us versus them effect To use the IIgs their way you first have to run out and buy several hundred dollars worth of APW Apple Programmer s Workshop software and those thirteen volumes needed to support it And you have to spend well over a year in time and an incredible amount of discipline and frustration to be able to master the APW environment Sadly your final results cannot be passed on to just anyone You can only talk to people who know use and understand APW All seven of
143. and publication can be done at essentially the wide open printing speed of the LaserWriter I invite you to try printing this any other way by using any other page making package If you can even remotely approach the final print speed flexibility or quality at 300 DPI I will give you a free copy of my Incredible Secret Money Machine book Extra points if you are able to do it without using either the Apple Writer program or an Apple Ile My gonzo justification routines are continually being improved Recent additions have included an individual character kerning improved tabbing and changes that make compiling run time code available A free printed listing of the latest gonzo version is now available by writing or calling me per the need help box you ll find at the end of this volume The ready to run code is also now available for most popular brands of personal computers on my current Work in Progress disk We also do custom versions of gonzo that solve specific user problems Previous ex amples have included Iowa weather forecasts exitable and landscapable legal Diablo emulators and for the automatic printing of waranty cards Give me a call for lots more info on any and all of this Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU April 1989 erry Cline and all of the usual suspects over at AZApple are now putting together the third annual Apple Fiesta to get held in the Safari Resort in Scotts dale
144. aoe INEL For Sane canon anaae ZKE Saal amol Aaaa 5 3 2 amp z K 2 E 6 E 3 g 8 2o 8 she 8 8 Zo s e 2238 2 FETA 3 2 8 2 2 o ase 2 zE 58 15 8 Ssro S2en So B80 Ey 5 Ro S280 2 a5 SSRS EPE S55e ener Pa 2258 az 5 58 EEFE 5S 2S a DoS BNE Jone 6 5 NS Zoor Ses SaNh ESTA Oo ba aye peat axy CEES 22 ZEN tga e5og eosnNyt SSNs Saag Eer a A masa 52 arag SSL fang Saag Syg oTo Sse Par s59 S258 Gent ass Segs EPT gata w SN gage Z25o sag PRST Sz25n Og 3 D Sugr Sram es E PRA Ee Sees i B oo zee Paon o S235 ag 2E Sage A 2 ea 5x2 ESE EES rs SSLN essa EOES S2 SA FERTA SSe5 SoS sas S508 EREE raze crore oare core ara mm e Ore Iro reo SNEL The apparent problems with host based software solutions are that they are very slow and that the PostScript emulation is partial at best Many of these also do not support the down loadable genuine Adobe PostScript fonts that are crucial to serious high end desktop publishing uses Finally rumor has it that HP is shortly coming out with a brand new duplex double sided laser printer that uses the super secret advanced Canon NX engine HP would have to be absolute idiots to not offer factory stock PostScript in this machine Time will tell Meanwhile I have got this anthill if you need it for any thing Anything at all Tell me all About A New Franchising Opportunity It is called Book Publishing on Demand and it goes like this Picture a machine in your video rental store o
145. aper S N DOOOOOOOOOO0O0000 Fig 5 Some uses for my PostScript boxdraw stuff J 35 4 ASK THE GURU into a black lagoon style of gloppy syrup Real yummy Two of the many trade journals that have lots of free paper and paper selection information in them are Printing Impressions and Electronic Publishing As usual see the Names and Numbers section for all of the needed addresses What is this Month s Postscript Utility This month we ll pick up a very simple and useful set of my boxdraw routines These will automatically put a box around anything you want The box can have square or rounded corners of any size or weight with or without a double hairline header You can also do radiused filletted or cusped corners for special effects Figure five shows you some of the sample boxifier output while figure six gives you the PostScript code The bl boxleft gets measured from the left edge of the paper while bw boxwidth is the width of the box between its left and right sides The bt boxtop is measured from the bottom of the page while the bh boxheight is the height of the box between its top and bottom An additional bc boxcenter var iable is defined for your later use It Va ea present and intact boxdraw boxpath stroke def boxfill boxpath fill def bc bl bw 2 div add def bl 200 def bw 175 def
146. ar column you like Since ctab is in raw PostScript code you might easily rearrange the scenery to suit yourself While ctab is intended for single line entries any left or fill justified column entry is able to automatically break itself up into as many vertical lines as needed At present you do have to bracket each entire data table with the xpos horizontal position a ypos vertical position an opening parenthesis the data a closing parenthesis and a ctab Which is no big deal But you can automate this by going to input file reading code such as we saw back in August Note that some extensions on this new general ctab technique will let you custom fill in such things as tax or insurance forms 47 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU February 1989 or several years now spunky and independent APDA was the place anybody could go to get Apple insider tech literatature Besides stocking nearly all of the Apple publications prelim inary or otherwise they also offered deep discounts on third party books and software Apple Computer has apparently taken over at least part of APDA and is now once again directly distrib uting much of its own tech literature While this should in theory improve service and speed up delivery there are already rumors of sharply high er prices particularly involving the IIgs APW and Mac MPW software development systems This new Apple service is called
147. around 2160 seconds per book which is roughly one book produced every 35 minutes Note particularly that any and all of those minutes could be done during lunch breaks or at night If you project what a laser printer will be capable of doing a few years from now this is obviously the time to be getting into and debugging your self publishing act in a big way Opporknockity tunes but once How can I Make a Perspective Drawing Why with AppleWriter on a IIe or IIgs of course How else could you possibly do a first quality perspective drawing The PostScript language and a laser printer does help out a tad along the way Check out figures three and four What you have here is a fast simple and disgustingly powerful means of creating your own custom two point perspective drawings Note particularly that each and every object in the perspective grid can be individually rotated that very accurate perspective circles and arcs are trivially included and above all that full perspective lettering is very simply and easily done using most any font of your choosing And this is by no means a static display system You can easily do a zoom a reposition or even a sequen tial animated flyby with only a very few extra keystrokes Not too shabby for AppleWriter eh what Figure five shows you some of the PostScript code involved The actual two point perspective math is not all that hairy and we may get into it ina future
148. at A Apple has now been struck with a corporate wide fit of gen erosititus excessus or else B Their suggested list prices are meaningless If a seer wanted to dust off their crystal ball though they just might make the following predictions for the low street prices once all the dust has settled 3795 for the high end NTX 2650 for the NT and no market whatsoever for the SC At this writing the best and by far the easiest to get service and repair manual for the SX engine is available from Hewlett Packard for 49 as their fine LaserJet II Service Manual part number 33440 90904 They offer overnight delivery along with VISA and an 800 number This manual is essential for any intelligent use of any SX based laser printer It will be interesting to see how long Apple will continue to pay H P a 49 rebate for each new Laser Writer they manage to sell Apple has also introduced a new MIDI musicial interface for both the IIgs and the Mac The list price in cluding the needed cables is 99 The AppleTalk network has been renamed LocalTalk and the price of the cables and connectors has been raised After all the name change did have to be funded somehow Word has it that the International Apple Core is in very deep trouble At least that s what several help line callers seem to think who have re ceived neither product nor refund for their numerous and repeated efforts What started out as an outstanding idea
149. atch if you pair BASIC with 57600 baud but this mode is very useful for preliminary testing and debugging Figure three does give you the 50 4 manual hex dump for your final driver if you are not now using an assembly system The figure one circuit only works with modified RS 232 receivers that can accept 0 and 5 logic states as well as the usual 3 and 3 You can also directly drive RS 423 with a con nector change For a true RS 232 interface you may want to add on a Maxim MAX232 driver chip We ll see some examples of these alternatives in future issues We will also see a much fancier and far more powerful internal AppleWriter 57600 baud interface next month What is LaserTalk I rarely review Mac programs but for those of you using a Macintosh for desktop publishing the LaserTalk code from Emerald City Software is certainly worth a close look What this does is set you up in an interactive PostScript environment that lets you work with and debug any portion of any program at any time A special preview mode gives you the equivalent of display Post Script and returns the actual Laser Writer bitmap image to your screen for later study Additional screens are available that let you read dictionaries view the stack and snoop around Another feature that you might find handy is that entire red book command set on line in full detail This particular feature requires a Mac with hierarchi
150. attractively reproduce a real photo And yes it does work on the Canon SX engine Three big limitations at present are that the visual edge is usually IBM pc based that it isn t yet PostScript compatible and that it is a voracious memory hog needing as much as four additional megabytes Meanwhile Weitek has a free new data booklet on their XL 8200 Hyper Script processor This beauty does some PostScript operations as much as 100 times faster than a LaserWriter Plus On the other hand it is only marginally faster than a LaserWriter The 1300 LaserWriters Secret non putrid grays Sources of ticket blanks WPL font selection code Gonzo justify templates N pnd fontload w ppr L ppr Font Picker PPL Mois ect entre Sind ppr ppr Inserts font into current textfile position ppr pprl3 Avant 0 Courier 29 Palatino pprl4 Avant b 1 Courier b 30 Palatino b pprl5 Avant i 2 Courier i 31 Palatino i pprl6 Avant bi 3 Courier bi 32 Palatino bi ppr ppr17 Bookman 8 Helvetica 4 Times ppr18 Bookman b 9 Helvetica b 5 Times b ppr19 Bookman i 10 Helvetica i 6 Times i ppr20 Bookman bi 11 Helvetica bi 7 Times bi ppr ppr25 Century 21 N Helvetica 12 Symbol ppr26 Century b 22 N Helvetica b 33 Zapf Italic ppr27 Century i 23 N Helvetica i 34 Zapf DIngbats ppr28 Century bi 24 N helvetica bi 99 Custom font ppr Son ae eS Saas Beco eee pinWhich Font gt SA 1 11 pas C D pasXSA B pgo8 pcs B X I 22 pas Bold SD pqt i 21 pasHelvetica Narro
151. ave to be super tricky to be able to use these horizontal counts for anything at all useful On the other hand an exact screen video lock can be done by repeatedly reading the horizontal line count with sneaky enough software Which is S Apple Special Education National Braille Press 20525 Mariani Avenue 36 M 88 Saint Stephen Street Cupertino CA 95014 Boston MA 02115 408 996 1010 617 266 6160 Children s Resource Center Pacer Center 1056 E 19th Avenue 4826 Chicago Ave South Denver CO 80218 Minneapolis MN 55417 303 861 6633 612 827 2966 Closing the Gap Inc SpecialLink PO Box 68 2512 Canterbury Avenue Henderson MN 56044 Cincinnati OH 45212 612 248 3294 513 531 9233 Communication Resources Special Technical Center 3201 Marshall Road Route 4 433 East Lafayette Kettering OH 45429 Jackson TN 38301 513 298 0803 901 423 9058 Computer Access Center Special Technology Center 2425 16th Street Room 23 535 Race St Suite 220 Santa Monica CA 90405 San Jose CA 95126 213 450 8827 408 288 5010 Computer CITE SuperGroup Evaluation 215 East New Hampshire 4129 Beaujolais Orlando FL 32084 Kenner LA 70065 305 299 5000 504 561 8713 Children s Computer Group Technical Access Center 2095 Rose Street 183 Lake Avenue Berkeley CA 94709 Newton MA 02159 415 841 3224 617 969 4279 Disabled Children s Group Technical Assistance 1146 South Third Street 1950 West Roosevelt Road Louisville KY 40203 Chicago IL 6060
152. ay def white 1 setgray def xrpt gsave aload pop trips exch def dist exch def rproc exch def trips gsave rproc grestore dist 0 translate repeat grestore def yrpt gsave aload pop trips exch def dist exch def rproc exch def trips gsave rproc grestore 0 dist translate repeat grestore def hole gsave 150 div dia exch def newpath dia 2 div 0 360 arc white fill grestore def icpad1v save psnap exch def trace50 2 copy gsave exch 0 2 sub exch am 0 4 r grestore 20 hole psnap restore def edgeconu gsave translate 0 4 0 moveto 0 2 0 4 0 180 arcn 0 2 rlineto closepath fill grestore def feedpad save fpsnap exch def newpath 2 copy black 0 25 0 360 arc fill 18 hole clear fpsnap restore def circpad2 save fpsnap exch def newpath 2 copy black 0 30 0 360 arc fill 22 hole clear fpsnap restore def dip8v gsave translate 0 0 icpad1v 1 4 yrpt 3 0 icpad1v 1 4 yrpt grestore def dip16v gsave translate 0 0 icpad1v 1 8 yrpt 3 0 icpad1v 1 8 yrpt grestore def 1 setlinejoin 1 setlinecap Fig 4 A sampler of my PostScript printed circuit routines N 40 4 ASK THE GURU What is This Month s PostScript utility For years I have been searching for a practical and economical way for hackers and engineers to do low end printed circuit layouts Obvious goals here are very high quality low cost use of nearly any computer at all avoiding any and all outrageously expensi
153. ball price When you add in all the needed accessories it really becomes a 2000 printer Ribbons are a steal at 30 each but at this bargain basement price you have to buy six of them at once The intended market for this seems to be for Fortune 500 facsimile use It does have a color capability and can handle envelopes and labels well There is no truth to the rumor that a Model 28 teletype emulator will soon be available for this machine Meanwhile back on the peninsula Adobe the PostScript people are up to all sorts of neat stuff First they have moved a few blocks Be sure to get their correct new address and phone number from the Names and Numbers section You can still get free subscriptions to Colophon some free posters on typography and the free sets of the PostScript Developer Guidelines from them But their really big news is that Adobe has finally dropped all their insane copy protection on their line of downloadable fonts All fonts shipped after September are fully deprotected and will now run on any number of machines More important they will not per manantly self destruct whenever your LaserWriter password blows up Let s give them a full 17 credits and at least six Attaboys for this Now if we can only get Adobe to drop the font lockout on pathforall we would be all set The double clip trick doesn t work anymore on V47 Win one lose one Adobe is also making a strong bid The paper c
154. brand Apple Computer employ ees of note You are specifically invited to attend It will be at the Safari Hotel in Scottsdale Arizona on June 11th and the 12th Cost for the two day show and for all the seminars and courses is around 25 For more de tails give Jim Ransom a call at 602 276 9332 In fact virtually every Apple IIc Ile and IIgs machine and assembly language programming author of note just may be there since Randy Hyde is now coordinating that Western De sign Center Orca roast for the very same weekend The object here is to replace ORCA M with a logical useful and non quirky development system for the IIc Ile IIgs and the upcoming censored For more details on this give Randy a call at 714 735 7714 All of them New Mexico orcas is really tough unless you cook them Pa to use this tool 01 04 05 0 these tools already be i 09 S must Vv nstalled required recommended 0A 0E OF 11 18 1B 0C 2 Memory manager 02 3 Misc Tools 8 Sound Manager 08 1 Tool locator 5 Desk Manager 6 Event Manager 4 QuickDraw Il 7 Scheduler Tool locator 9 Desktop Bus 10 SANE Toolset 11 Integer Math 12 Text Tools 14 Window Mgr 15 Menu Manager 16 Control Manager 10 17 System Loader 18 Quickdraw Aux 19 Print Manager 20 Line Edit 21 Dialog Manager 15 22 Scrap Manager 23 Standard Files 25 Note Synt
155. bt 500 def bh 240 def brad 7 def blw 2 def hd 25 def grestore showpage boxdraw box and border drawing utilities Copyright c 1988 by Don Lancaster amp Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal and non commercial uses permitted so long as this header remains both To use enter bl bw bt bh brad blw boxdraw For a hairline use hd hairdraw after drawing the box Large positive brad values give you rounded boxes A brad value equal to blw 2 gives you a radiused box A zero brad value gives you square corners A negative brad equal to blw 2 gives you a corner fillet Larger negative brad values give you cusp style corners boxpath blw exch def dup 0 eq pop 0 001 if brad exch def bh exch def bt exch def bw exch def bl exch def br bl bw add def bc bl bw 2 div add def bb bt bh sub def strt br bl add 2 div def newpath strt bt moveto br bt br bb brad arcto br bb bl bb brad arcto bl bb bl bt brad arcto bl bt strt bt brad arcto closepath blw setlinewidth def hairdraw gsave hd exch def 0 5 setlinewidth bl bt hd sub moveto bw 0 rlineto 0 2 5 rmoveto bw neg 0 rlineto stroke def I DEMO REMOVE BEFORE USE bl bw bt bh brad blw boxdraw hd hairdraw gsave bl 10 add bb 15 add translate any stuff to be locked inside the box goes here Fig 6 Some of my Postscript boxdraw routines N 35 5
156. cartridges such as those used in a LaserWriter NT or NTX The only little problem I have found with the modified unit is that you have to trim your laminating film to a maximum width of 8 1 2 inches Kroy s Color Plus machine shares the same problem at least at present Figure two shows you a parts list for this mod Figure three is a full size replica of the new dial decal Figure four gives you the detailed instructions while figure five shows you where to position the decal on the front of the machine Finally figure six is a pictorial for the mod The fusion unit does its thing by comparing a thermistor s resistance NS yellow wires from thermistor FH 0576 01 fusion board 25K linear potentiometer CD CD st N F D303 D304 R308 o Ww R307 red 150K 1 2 watt resistor green brown green yellow twist wires tightly together Fig 6 Pictorial of the Canon Fuser Machine Modification J 43 4 ASK THE GURU against a fixed voltage reference The modification lets you raise or lower that internal reference by sourcing or sinking extra current The temperature range is set by a new 150K resistor A higher value re stricts the range while a lower value will extend it A half watt resistor is chosen here because it is physically stronger than a quarter watt one The checkout procedure is fairly simple Center your new temperature control and then apply the power T
157. ccomplished so far with their intentionally soft SX drums all their carbide tipped toner their grossly overpriced cartridges and their no reload policy Well I feel they 1 Have hacked off 90 percent of their existing users and just about 100 percent of their more knowledgeable perspective buyers 2 Have created the entire new toner refilling industry where there are hundreds of sources of cartridge refilling services that in turn dramat ically reduce the cartridges actually purchased from Canon 3 Have handed the entire low end desktop laser printer business over to NEC and their LC 890 with its much lower per page toner costs and last but not least 4 Have cut off their nose to spite their face What really galls me about all this are those Canon ads proudly pro claiming their super hard longer life coating process they use on their high end copier drums I say again Toner should cost the same as ink 0 25 cents per page No more When it does the true desktop revolution will at long last begin Till then you just ain t seen nuthin Alan Kalka has gotten his original PostScript BBS back on line along with several brand new sponsors and lots of new equipment Try dialing up 713 688 1779 There is also a West Coast BBS at 707 882 2390 I finally found out what Matro Color is It apparently is the leading color proofing and instant transfer process that will give you full color images that
158. ce Manual Once again do NOT skip any steps or hard disks will be trashed Fig 2 How to eject a 3 5 inch disk J fying the patch after it is installed And here is an important warning that most beginning patchees often miss if any portion of any patch is wrong or mislocated you MUST reset to zero and start all over again with a fresh backup copy Rule number five is to test your patches ONLY with scrap or expen dable files until you are absolutely sure your code is well behaved From time to time I have published patches for all of the various Apple Writer programs as has Don Thomp son in his nicely done AppleWriter enhancement kits Now this may sound obvious but you cannot normally make a patch to a program from within that program itself Instead you can boot up your system master disk and get into BASIC under DOS 3 3 or else select BASIC SYSTEM from ProDOS Then you get into the monitor by doing a CALL 151 You are in the monitor when there is an asterisk in the lower left hand screen corner To verify the current contents of an address in machine language you enter that address followed by the carriage return For instance if you type a lt 1BF4 return gt the machine should respond with 1BF4 A9 or whatever other hex byte was in this particular location Should you hit another carriage return successive hex bytes appear on the screen But note that you can only have one hex byte
159. certainly welcome any and all input on a suitable transfer material that was stable cheap and reliable There is a humongous market just waiting here Va requires printed circuit sampler code of figure four 100 100 2X 11 11 showgrid trace20 10 2 am 110 75 l 4 510 75 I 216u105am0 7511 5 l 1 25 0 5 l 210 514 0 75 u 1 25 l 74am 0 751 0 5 l 0 75 155 5 am 1 l 1 5u54 5am2l 2u26 5am 1 5 u 7 3 am 0 5 l 2 75 I 0 75 l 0 5 u 0 75 l 2 3 5 am 1 I 10 9 am 0 75 l 2 75 0 5 l 2 75 d 1 16 6 5 am 2 15 d 0 35 l 1 1512 l 1156 5 am 1 5 u 7 2 dip16v 2 3 5 dip8v 1 10 edgeconu 1 5 xrpt 3 2 circpad2 4 2 circpad2 3 5 5 feedpad showpage Fig 5 A simple 2X printed circuit layout example N for the right product Once again the material must be transparent dimen sionally stable at high temperatures and has to loosely but reliably accept toner The toner must then be able to be reliably transferred di rectly to a printed circuit board for use as an etch resist Help Figure three shows you a typical working layout Here viewed from the top of the board are an overlay grid the component side traces in gray and finally the foil side done in black As you can see arbitrarily complex layouts are simple and easy to do This one is a 50 control computer using the M50734 What I would like to do here is share several of the more funda mental PostScript language pc layout codes with you Figure four is a
160. chematic The dipdraw routine accepts two position values a size numeric a title string a top callouts string and a bottom callouts string Dipdraw will then automatic ally draw the correct dip of the cor rect size in your chosen location The Postscript dipdraw coding is shown you in figure four A zillion previous examples appear in all of my Hardware Hacker columns that appear in Radio Electronics Complement bars on the callouts are all automatically handled with a leading slash A maximum of three characters per callout is typical Four can sometimes be used if the adjacent callouts are thin enough If the integrated circuit has 36 or more pins it is drawn one unit higher than are all the packages with fewer pins This preserves a good shape factor for LSI chips The width of the device number font can be changed if you need to force extra characters into a smaller package outline The drawing is normally scaled so that one unit represents the spacing between two pins The position is al ways referred to pin number one If you are drawing many different inte grated circuits you can use a special dictionary so that calling perhaps dip27256 will automatically get the correct values and drop them in place with only a few keystrokes The dipdraw pictorial is opaque Normally you will place your wiring early in your textfile and your dip draw routines later This way the dip pictorial will overlay the wiring and
161. components that when melted together can create a durable varnish or raised epoxy That would really be potent In fact any way of handling laser thermography would be real handy N Copyright c 1989 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal non commercial use permitted so long as this header remains present and intact Latest work in progress disk costs 39 50 Requires my gonzo justify and my ps util 1 Free printed copies on request ps util 1 begin printerror nuisance begin landscape font0 NewCenturySchlbk Bold findfont 1 5 0 0 1 5 0 0 makefont setfont def font1 Helvetica Bold findfont 0 7 0 0 0 7 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 Helvetica findfont 0 8 0 0 0 8 0 0 makefont setfont def colcheck def startwith 0 def showthegrids false def printnames yinc 1 8 def 0 0 0330 cc gsave 20 22 translate 90 rotate ofnamestoprint 0 0 brbarray startwith get cl copypage newpath 2 10 mt 15 pu 30 pr 15 pd closepath gsave 1 setgray fill grestore startwith startwith 1 add def repeat grestore def logo your return address or return logo proc goes here def background 25 21 10 setgrid showthegrids 35 57 showgrid if bestgray lightgray 0 7 setgray 0 35 57 57 1 2 0 4 quickboxdraw black newpath logo def generatethepage yinc 2 def save rightsnap exch def 11 2 div 72 mul 8 5 72 mul translate 180 rotate 25 21 10 setgrid showthegrids 35
162. cts avail able my Show and Tell is usually your best starting point if you already have a PostScript printer or my Introduction to PostScript video if you do not Go for it I ve also got a brochure or two for you that provides all sorts of insider sources for great free stuff Write or call if you are interested As per always this is your column and you can get tech help and off the wall networking by calling or writing me per the end box This month we ll have a special one time double whammy for all of you desktop publising fanatics first details on a low cost machine to fuse Omnicolor or Kroy Kolor and then info on how to sight read most any PostScript eexec file But first Does Anyone at Apple Ever Listen The Apple II Marketing Manager over at Apple Computer is Peter Sandys Peter most definitely does welcome any of your courteous and well thought out letters on future Apple II directions on any problems you have found with any existing products and systems or on any sug gestions for improvements of most any reasonable sort I believe he is serious and will act on user input But please please do not overload him with personal tirades or ask him to referee a local dealer squabble Peter s AppleLink mail address is SANDYS What is the Canon SX Cartridge Debacle The LaserWriter NT and NTX are both absolutely outstanding laser printers but unless Canon immed iately cleans up t
163. culating and formatting steps that will further reduce all your actual run times The theory is that a little time spent now can save you bunches in the future Before you try this you should be certain that you do have the exact images you really are after As with any compiler you must do all of your editing before you compile and not after Get it right first In general you can compile into runtime textfiles by running all your files and then suitably modifying all them with PostScript intercepting and compiling procs and then returning the modified files back to your host for recording as a new runtime text file The compiling process can be partially or totally automated This depends on your programming style and the type of documents you wish to book on demand produce Several guidelines here Eliminate all or nearly all of the comments and pretty printing in your run time files And let your runtime files work with answers rather than by doing actual calculations There is no point what soever in making your justification calculations each and every time you time you print Instead you do it once during your compiling step In a runtime file you should be able to print anything in any order So it makes sense to only select each font once You first print all of your regular text then all of your italic text then all the bold text and so on Let us look at an example of com piling some fancy j
164. d FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two for the best response of all S shown as female DIP socket on motherboard shown as female DB 9 socket on rear panel Use a female 24 pin DIP socket and a male DB 9 plug to adapt an old game paddle or joystick to the rear panel connector Use a male 24 pin DIP plug and a female DB 9 plug to adapt a new game paddle or joystick to the internal motherboard socket Fig 3 Two old new game paddle adapters 45 3 ASK THE GURU What is This Month s PostScript Utility Two of the real beauties of the PostScript language are that it is both threaded and extensible This means you can add any new commands you want to the language any time you wish The only rule is that you have to define any of your new commands C N acos Trig arccosine call with xside hypotenuse acos See also asin asin Trig arcsine call with yside hypotenuse acos See also acos backwards Print backwards from right to left For transparent window decals baud 57600 x 25 Set the baud rate to 57600 baud XON XOFF handshaking on the DB25 connector The others are similar This is device dependent bestgray A 106 line 45 degree screen A good general all purpose fine gray black Switch to black Same as 0 setgray blackflash Eject totally black page Use twice for highest possible print quality copies Select the number of copies as in 6 copies dobaud A service r
165. d a custom panel service going A competing and apparently less popular process is called Fotofoil Tellyawhat For this month s con test just dream up an off the wall new or obscure use for Metalphoto or Fotofoil We will have the usual books and tinaja quests as prizes Tell me More About IWEM The IIgs disk file SYSTEM MAS TER APPLETALK IWEM on the IIgs system master disk is an ordinary textfile that contains an excellent imagewriter emulator for your Laser Writer or for pretty near any other PostScript speaking printer You can easily move this file over to a Ile or over to most any personal computer just by grabbing it When transmitted as PostScript code IWEM first tests for its own presence inside your printer and then downloads a persistent clone of itself that remains so long as power is applied To switch into your imagewriter emulation mode on a Ile or an IBM clone you enter the code _WBJ_ The rest of that particular job will be done as if you had a high resolution version of an ImageWriter printer The code is very easily modified to change it back into an emulator of most any daisywheel or dot matrix printer you care to You might also select proportional type fonts but note that this works best with a left justified text and can cause all sorts of serious hassles with spreadsheets or columnar data As we found out last month the present LaserWriter Appletalk driver automatically activates your I
166. d an emulation mode in which the chip thinks it is a plain old 6502 or 65C02 You switch between the emulation mode and the native mode by flip ping a special flag that is hidden behind the carry flag As figure two shows us the XCE command will automatically exchange the carry and the emulation flags On reset the 65816 always will power itself up in the 6502 emulation mode In the emulation mode all memory references all accumulator loads and all index registers are supposed to be 8 bits wide In addition many of the fancier 65816 instructions might be meaningless or else might do bizarre things This 8 bit emulation mode is primarily intended for running older software as written originally for the 6502 or 65C02 In the native mode you have your choice of 8 bit or 16 bit memory ref erences and separately of 8 bit or 16 bit sizes for those X and Y registers As figure two shows us these selec tions are pretty much independent The SEP and REP commands are used to set the m and the x flags Note that for most uses most of the time a 16 bit microprocessor usually makes mostly 8 bit commands and primarily carries out 8 bit operations To not do so is often a waste of pro cessor time and of memory space It is only when you specifically do need wider words that you will switch into full 16 bit operation For instance one ASCII character in a word processor often only has to be 7 or at most 8 bits wide There
167. d best Apple magazine and the fourth best Apple magazine through synergy and their combined resources should shortly be able to become the seventh best Apple magazine My very favorite Apple magazine of course is Tom Weishaar s great A2 Central which recently changed its name from Open Apple Number two remains CALL A P P L E Even though he ceased publication back issues and reprints from Bob Sander Cedarlof s Apple Assembly Lines still remain available and contain lots of goodies not available elsewhere Two smaller newsletters that are now coming on rather strong are Ross Lambert s Reboot for beginning Apple users and his new Sourceror s Apprentice for all you users of Roger Wagner s Merlin assembler By the way Merlin is now finally available for the IIgs Roger sent me Va S Apple Ile Technical Reference hardbound 408 pages 24 95 Apple Ilc Technical Reference hardbound 576 pages 24 95 Apple Ilgs Toolbox Reference hardbound 776 pages 28 95 Apple Ilgs Toolbox Reference II hardbound 700 pages 28 95 Apple Ilgs Hardware Reference hardbound 312 pages 24 95 Apple Ilgs Firmware Reference hardbound 352 pages 24 95 Technical Into to the Apple Ilgs paperback 160 pages 9 95 Inside Macintosh Volume paperback 550 pages 24 95 Inside Macintosh Volume II paperback 428 pages 24 95 Inside Macintosh Volume III paperback 280 pages 24 95 Inside Macintosh Volume
168. d refill them up to seven times bringing all your toner costs down into the 0 33 cents a page range that is cost com petitive with jiffy offset printing Unfortunately those SX cartridges do use a highly abrasive toner com bined with drums that are intolerably scratch sensitive So while you can in fact reload SX cartridges at present you can not even remotely approach those CX cartridge economics So do consider this a progress report where Ill bring you up to date on what can and can not be done at the present While it is difficult to even get a second SX reload you can sometimes do so with the following tricks and techniques Firstoff you immediately remove the factory toner and give it to your friendly neighborhood diesel mechanic for use as valve grinding compound Replace it with a good quality third party refill toner Second use a good quality drum lubricant such as Pixie Dust or its equivalent Do a very light dusting on every refill There are two refilling methods the Punch and Go and the Total Teardown I very much prefer punch and go since this delivers far and away the lowest per page toner cost to the end user We charge 22 for local SX refills Since this is a remote rural area I can get away with such an outrageously high price You can do the job yourself for as little as February 1989 7 50 and three minutes time The SX cartridge needs modified before you can refill it Using a Vise
169. darken and pick up a high gloss July 1988 You can also spray your cards with artists fixative but Bakerizing does a better job and costs less Kroy Color itself will slightly increase the dur ability The ultimate trip though is to use the Kroy Laminating Film to create a virtually unscuffable card Normally you would use plain old cover stock in various colors as the business card base Typically you can get a dozen cards per sheet The Paper Plus chain is a low cost source for cover stock The PostScript code for a typical step and repeat personal map card is shown you in figure five You ll also need my step and repeat routine my curve tracing routine and rubbergrid You can get these from back issues of Computer Shopper from the Ask The Guru reprints or from my new Don Lancaster s PostScript Secrets book and disk combo or else PI be happy to send you a free printed copy of each needed routine We ll have both a technical and a non technical contest for this month There will be the usual Incredible Secret Money Machine prizes with an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two for the best You can either send me an unusual card design that uses my PostScript code or else show me a practical way to combine both the toner and the thermographic raised ink technologies together into one single product Let s hear from you personal map 12 up business card PostScript example
170. ded for various sound effects It can also be come the basis for a highly useful random number generator that is far better than the fatally flawed one that is used in AppleSloth More details on all this with full working source and object code do appear in my Assembly Cookbook For The Apple II and Ie Write or call if you need an autographed copy What is The PC Transporter I am not a great fan of MS DOS I feel it is insipid stilted and grossly uninspiring Totally lacking in vibes of any nature The sort of thing you would expect a middle management insurance actuary to be using while working on the fifteenth floor of a Milwaukee office building Nonetheless there sure are a lot of people laboring under the delusion that they are willing to actually pay for disks that say MS DOS on them So since I am a card carrying and graduate member of the P T Barnum school of marketing theory all of my software is initially developed on an Apple Ie or IIgs and then translated and sold to unsuspecting IBM Mac and Atari folks As you can imagine it has been a real problem to translate and then duplicate disks In particular all of the MS DOS translations did involve hauling Bee s IIc across town and connecting it to a Hong Kong clone sending the files over with Apple Writer and receiving them with PC Talk But Kate moved and so did her Hong Kong machine What to do It was Applied Engineering to the January 1989
171. demand printing applications I want an automatic initial drop cap plus the ability to use hanging punctuation While rarely seen in anything but the finest of books and magazines hanging punctuation can noticeably improve just about any 300 DPI fill justified text I want to be able to handle single callout messages as easily as I can large blocks of text And I want the same routine to emulate just about anything that uses embedded printing commands With the added ability to instantly switch between emulation and full PostScript at any time for any reason I want to be able to add bells and whistles such as tabs French spaces custom character kerning extra end of paragraph ledding soft hyphens conditional formfeeds hard spaces superbold print the works Finally of course I would want it fully open totally unlocked unpro tected very easily customized and widely available at a very low cost So Where is it In figure two of course Figure two gives you a complete listing of all my current gonzo justify routines Figure three lists all of the more important PostScript variables while Figure four gives you a summary of the currently embeddable commands a N esc 0 Change to font0 Preferred use initial drop cap esc 1 Change to font1 Preferred use normal body text esc 2 Change to font2 Preferred use italic body text esc 3 Change to font3 Preferred use bold body text e
172. der costs for the LaserWriter II Which is over a 15 1 cost penalty It is absolutely totally and utterly inexcusable to not offer any refillable LaserWriter SX cartridges as factory or third party options Needless to say stay tuned for more on all this Steve Ciarcia has started up a new hacker s magazine known as Circuit Cellar Ink that does look like a real winner And as a reminder if you are into electronic hardware at all be sure to check into my Hardware Hacker sister column to this one that is going great guns over in Radio Electronics magazine Let s see Which advetorial should I get you to ignore this month How about my new PostScript language perspective drawing package and my PostScript Show amp Tell or my com plete set of Ask the Guru reprints Write or call if you need more info on these or any others The big stupendous breakthrough deal this month is an automatic and insanely intelligent PostScript border machine But first What is the IIgs programmer s dilemma Here is something that I ve been kicking around with my students and with some user groups I would also like some input from you on this The IIgs may have thrown out the baby with the washwater On the Apple II and I any old seventh grader could hack around long enough till they got a something that actually seemed to work He could jot it down on a napkin and share it with others This would go on building
173. div floor yinc mul yinc 2 mul add def tadj 0 def ifelse collimits dup dup dup dup dup 0 get tadj sub 0 exch put 2 get tadj sub 2 exch put 4 get tadj sub 4 exch put def startpage boilerplate column 1 def ybot 99999 def def colcheck ypos ybot le column column 1 add def totalcolumns column It showpage quit if ytop collimits column 1 sub 2 mul get def ybot collimits column 1 sub 2 mul 1 add get def xpos xpos colspace add def ytop ybot sub yinc gt exit if column column 1 add def totalcolumns column It showpage quit if loop ypos ytop def if def fullheight coltop colbot sub yinc add def keystonewide 300 def keystonedelta 5 def keystoneshow false def gotarline save ksnap exch def justifylastparline true def txtwide keystonewide def xpos exch ypos exch cf clear ksnap restore keystonewide keystonewide keystonedelta add def xpos xpos keystonedelta sub def ypos ypos yinc sub def def crk msg exch def ypos exch def keystonewide sub xpos exch def msg search exch pop exch msg exch def gotarline gotarline exit ifelse loop def gotacline save ksnap exch def justifylastparline true def txtwide keystonewide def xpos exch ypos exch cf clear ksnap restore keystonewide keystonewide keystonedelta add def xpos xpos keystonedelta 2 div sub def ypos ypos yinc sub def def cck msg exch def ypos exch def keystonewide 2 div sub xpos exch def msg search exch pop exch msg exch def got
174. dj add def bw txtwide def true figparams collimits dup 3 get bh add yfigadj add 3 exch put yfigadj 0 def def figure1lr bl leftmargin colspace 2 mul add 1 add def bb collimits 5 get yfigadj add def ow txtwide def true figoaramscollimits dup 5 get bh add yfigadj add 5 exch put yfigadj 0 def def figuretul bl leftmargin 0 add 1 add def bt collimits 0 get 6 add def bw txtwide def false figparams collimits dup 0 get uppershift 0 exch put yfigadj O def def figuretur bl leftmargin colspace 2 mul add 1 add def bt collimits 0 get 6 add def bw txtwide def false figparams collimits dup 4 get uppershift 4 exch put yfigadj 0 def def figure2lr bl leftmargin colspace add 1 add def bb collimits 3 get yfigadj add def ow colspace txtwide add def true figparams collimits dup 3 get bh add yfigadj add 3 exch put collimits dup 5 get bh add yfigadj add 5 exch put yfigadj 0 def def figure2ul bl leftmargin 0 add 1 add def bt collimits 0 get 6 add def bw colspace txtwide add def false figparams collimits dup 0 get uppershift 0 exch put collimits dup 2 get uppershift 2 exch put yfigadj 0 def def figure2ur bl leftmargin colspace add 1 add def bt collimits 0 get 6 add def bw colspace txtwide add def false figparams collimits dup 2 get uppershift 2 exch put collimits dup 4 get uppershift 4 exch put yfigadj 0 def def figure2ll bl leftmargin 0 add 1 add def bb collimits 1 get yfigadj add def bw colspac
175. doesn t do the best possible job Many auto hyphen routines will only break at the first possible place in a word rather than at an optimum Next you add or remove connec tives Nobody pays any attention at all to words like a an the do and or all So add or remove these to get the most uniform and the densest line Another ploy is to either use or not use contractions Use of a let s takes up less space than does let us and aren t will use less space than are not and so on A subtle way of improving the line aesthetics that most publishers do overlook is to use a slightly smaller type font for numbers or any capital strings Fractional font sizes are a must for this sort of thing It also pays to stash a list of your favorite alike but different some how words whose meanings are all more or less the same but which will take up different amounts of space Some a few and several are obvious examples Adjusting each paragraph so it ends in the middle of a line rather than at the extreme end or beginning can also greatly improve readability and appearance Adding or removing words is the obvious way to handle this task You also want to avoid widows and orphans which are single words or very short lines at the top or bottom of any column These are especially bad at the beginning or end of any page The same tricks you used to lengthen or shorten your paragraphs will also
176. dramatically drop the price is to use spot color Ferinstance on a letter head you tape a small piece of Kroy Kolor applied only to the logo and then run it back through the printer Be sure to use a very low tack tape such as the Scotch Post It Cover Up Tape from your local office supply But there is a better way It turns out there is a wondrously bizarre ma chine that is available today on the surplus market known as a F21680 Canon Fuser Unit Nobody and especially all of the Canon dealers had even the slight est idea what these machines were for or how to use them so they were all dumped at fire sale prices September 1988 on off switch TEMPERATURE n _ 3 8 Fig 5 Location of the new fusion dial decal J Rumor has it the machines were somehow involved in creating color overhead transparencies At any rate The only difference between a genuine Omnicrom fusion machine and a Canon fuser unit is around 5 1 in cost and the fact that the stock Canon fuser machine was preset to a fixed lower temperature Fortunately for sixty cents worth of parts and twenty minutes work you can convert the Canon unit into a beast that actually will outperform the Omnicrom machine and do so at a tiny fraction of the going cost That super rugged Canon unit does give better results both because of a slower feeding speed and several self cleaning roller wiper pads It works especially well with the SX toner
177. e 0 0 fontsize 0 0 makefont setfont moveto 360 false charpath clip fontsize 12 div setlinewidth stroke grestore def closedapple gsave fontsize exch def Symbol findfont fontsize 0 0 fontsize 0 0 mgGfont setfont moveto g show grestore def demos g use postion adcosiseript code for open and closed apples Ta N yposition 3060 def fontsize 60 def 36 3 ASK THE GURU Finally remember that any lister will lie like a rug unless it begins its listing process at a valid point in legal and legitimate code In the He you had a hint in the way of lots of question marks when something was wrong with your listing entry point On the IIgs since each and every op code is used for something and lists as such it takes a little more practice and experience to separate valid listings from files wrong start ing points or outright trash How can I Print Directly Onto Metal As usual you start out with Apple writer and then create your original artwork on a LaserWriter ending up with a negative transparency Then you go to yet another little known and magic material that has been scunging around for dozens of years This one is called Metalphoto The Metalphoto products are a series of aluminum sheets that have gone halfway through an annodiz ing process and have then gotten suitably photosensitized You expose and then develop the sheets to create a real photographic image Finally
178. e Shorts or glitches can noise or glitches here can cause damage cause damage 2 BUTTON INPUT 0 GAME PADDLE 2 The pushbutton 0 input is Expects a 10K to 150K shared with the open apple variable resistor to 5vdc key No connection logic for paddle or joystick zero 5 vdc logic one operation Second user 3 BUTTON INPUT 1 GAME PADDLE 0 6 This pushbutton 1 input is Expects a 10K to 150K shared with the closed apple variable resistor to 5vdc key No connection logic for paddle or joystick zero 5 vdc logic one operation First user 4 BUTTON INPUT 2 OUTPUT STROBE 5 No connection logic zero Outputs a brief active low 5 vde logic one pulse when bit tested Not present on the llgs Fig 1 Connections to the old Apple Game Socket J 45 1 ASK THE GURU Volume II of Ask The Guru is now shipping This is a complete rewrite including lots of new material a big master Names and Numbers section and a full index Besides all of the Apple and PostScript stuff the text is also a tour de force of personal book self publishing As per usual this is your column and you can get tech help and some off the wall networking per the Need Help end box And now What Computers Do You Actually Use About a dozen of them I d guess But my main machine is now a cross between a Ile and a IIgs running a fast ProDOS 8 and driving a Laser Writer NTX AppleWriter and WPL are run on thi
179. e aload pop cvx exec if linestring 3 1 roll getinterval 3 1 roll cfix add 3 1 roll sfix add 3 1 roll 0 exch 0 4 1 roll 32 4 1 roll awidthshow for ifelse bind def The gonzolink dictionary links the one character escape commands to their gonzoprocs While this is completely flexible recommend using numerics for font selections Capital numerics for tabs uppercase for mode and justify selections lowercase for o immediately executed PostScript utilities and value changes and high ASCII for anything o that is special for one specific or unusual job Reese gonzolink 255 dict def gonzolink begin 0 48 changefont def 1 49 changefont def 2 50 changefont def 3 51 changefont def 4 52 changefont def 5 53 changefont def 6 54 changefont def 7 55 changefont def 8 56 changefont def 9 57 changefont def 45 changefont def 61 changefont def C 67 changejust def center justify F 70 changejust def fill justify L 76 changejust def left justify R 82 changejust def right justify a amacro def b bmacro def c cmacro def d dmacro def e emacro def f fmacro def g def to prevent reentry h ypos ypos yinc 2 div add def def i initialcap def initialcap oktohere oktohere 1 add def endtheline def force new line n nobreak conditional formfeed p pm pmnorm def def normal pmargin s showpage def showpage x exit should be trapped b
180. e txtwide add def true figparams collimits dup 1 get bh add yfigadj add 1 exch put collimits dup 3 get bh add yfigadj add 3 exch put yfigadj 0 def def figure3ll bl leftmargin 0 add 1 add def bb collimits 1 get yfigadj add def bw colspace 2 mul txtwide add def true figparams collimits dup 1 get bh add yfigadj add 1 exch put collimits dup 3 get bh add yfigadj add 3 exch put collimits dup 5 get bh add yfigadj add 4 exch put yfigadj 0 def def figure3ul bl leftmargin 0 add 1 add def bt collimits 0 get 6 add def bw colspace 2 mul txtwide add def false figparams collimits dup 0 get bh sub yfigadj sub yinc sub 0 exch put collimits dup 2 get bh sub yfigadj sub yinc sub 2 exch put collimits dup 4 get bh sub yfigadj sub yinc sub 4 exch put yfigadj 0 def def end Fig 4b Three column gonzo template concluded get one of the default ones shown in the map instead Your command for the overall best gray is 106 45 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen For the densest useful gray try a 135 25 before your setscreen proc This does take careful paper selection and attention to detail For a useful repro gray that will get reduced somewhat before you do your final printing try a 85 35 before your setscreen proc The stock putrid gray 17 can be restored with a 53 45 prefix To get the utmost prepress quality off of any gray image first print up two totally black pages The complete details
181. e covering many hundreds of electronic data bases If the topic that you are reserching is even remotely popular or scholarly you will defin itely find it on Dialog While those 0334 2 0331 per minute typical 0332Dialog 0331 charges would seem a tad on the steep side at first glance 0334 A 0331 this is ridiculously and insanely cheaper than getting the information by any other means 0334 B 0331 the searches are far more thorough and more complete than you could possibly hope to do on your own 033x Fig 5b Three column gonzo textfile concluded N 49 7 block Similar techniques can be used for wedging left wedging right or to flow around any form Figure five does show you some sample text that illustrates how to use the fancy gonzo template of figure four While this particular example is from my Hardware Hacker reprint series it is essentially the same but a tad fancier than what you are look ing at here A free printed listing of the Ask The Guru II is available on phone or letter request Figure five has substituted the 033 for any embedded escape commands just in case your word processor can not handle this detail Your print file is around 10K long and the page makeup time is around thirty seconds using the Apple Ie driving a LaserWriter NTX This can get reduced to a two second makeup time by doing a pseudocompile that we will get into in a future column With a compiling pass the book on dem
182. e fee In this day and age it is absolutely inexcusable to not provide PostScript on any stock laser printer regardless of the list price After having worked extensively with PostScript for several years now I firmly believe that there is at least a 50 1 performance advantage of any PostScript speaking printer over anything else available Thus for a non PostScript printer to offer the same value as the Apple LaserWriter with its current 3525 street price you would have to be able to buy that printer for 70 50 November 1987 Important advantages of PostScript include its ability to handle entire page scaleable translateable and ro tatable mixed text and graphics in any combination providing you with thousands of different fonts that are instantly scaleable in all sizes from 3 points to 75 000 points PostScript includes a sophisticated way of drawing smooth and contin uous curves These are called cubic splines and are much more powerful than the usual smoothing algorithms And most important of all Post Script is largely device independent Device independence means you can use any computer from a ZX80 to a N THATCHER Incident FIRE Record oO Erre R spons oO oO present absent Incident Jerry Robinson DEPARTMENT 1987 sheet two for Frank Langley Jay Layton Steve Allen Mike Payne Rue Mattice Brooks Bryce Kendall Curt
183. e now available through Arlin Shepard at Lazer Products Tell me Once Again About Those Non Putrid Grays I sure have been getting a lot of calls on this lately so let s us do a spring rerun here The overwhelming majority of LaserWriter applications software and most users all seem to March 1989 NS 6 Copyright c 1989 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics 746 First Street Thatcher o AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal use permitted so long as this header remains present and intact Work in Progress disk costs 39 50 LL This template intended for use with gonzo dl 6 and ps util 1 or later persistent true def persistent serverdict begin 0 exitserver if hack ll temp 1 1000 dict def hack ll temp 1 begin onto Times Bold findfont 54 0 0 54 0 32 makefont setfont def onti Times Roman findfont 9 75 0 0 9 75 0 0 makefont setfont def ont2 Times ltalic findfont 9 75 0 0 9 75 0 0 makefont setfont def ont3 Times Bold findfont 9 75 0 0 9 75 0 6 makefont setfont def ont4 Times Roman findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def ont5 Times ltalic findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def ont6 Times Bold findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def ont7 Helvetica findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def ont8 Helvetica findfont 8 0 0 8 0 0 makefont setfont def ont9 Helvetica Bold findfont 9 0 0 9 0 4 makefont setfont def ont ZapfDingbats findfont 9 0 0 9 0 4
184. e storage type in its upper four bits and the length of the filename as the lower four bits Common storage types include 00 for deleted 01 for a single data block file 02 for a 2 256 data block file and 0D BYTES 01 0F holds the filename in low ASCII up to 15 characters holds the file type The file types include 04 for text 06 for binary 0F for directory 19 for Appleworks data base 1B for Appleworks word processing 1B for Appleworks spreadsheet FC for Applesloth Basic and FF for a ProDOS system file BYTES 11 12 hold the block number of the key block for the file This is arranged low byte first BYTES 13 14 hold the total number of blocks used This is also arranged BYTES 15 17 hold the total length of the file arranged in low byte mid byte high byte order holds the access bits for the file Bit 01 allows reading of the file Bit 02 allows writing to the file Bit 40 alows renaming and Bit 80 permits destruction lock 0 unlock 1 Fig 2 Important Bytes in a ProDOS catalog entry measures the network s signal to noise ratio Should any communi cations problems develop then an alternate signalling route is automat ically selected Each node is extremely rugged and requires very little maintenence The nodes use zero electrical input power instead substituting an ingeneous kin etic energy transfer mechanism Supporting the LAN of the eighties i
185. e that publishes a newsletter and offers a number of support and net working products If you are using or going to use one of these machines be sure to check them out Tell Me All About Self Publishing Books As we found out in our previous ATG columns custom laser book printing is more than cost compet itive with jiffy printing escpecially when you do not know exactly how many copies you will actually sell Other major advantages of laser self publishing are that you can make additions or corrections at any time you can send out your review copies within minutes after the manuscript gets in its final form that you can instantly and electronically transmit copies anywhere in the world and that you can print each customer s name in gold on each copy But the biggest advantage of all to laser self publishing is that every thing you do is wid your own widdle hatchet There s no way that others are able to screw up the works for you through any incompetence or delays sloppy work lack of attention to detail misinterpretion outright lies committeespeak missed deliv ery schedules or overpricing You instead get to do all of these things all by yourself For nearly a year now I have been self publishing my Ask The Guru reprints and I thought I would bring you up to date on how this is being done The bottom line is that the process works and works very well and that I intend to be publishing many other title
186. e to the outside end of diode D304 Replace both circuit boards the three large Phillips screws the black and white motor connector the two red power resistor wires and the blue 5 pin connector Redress the yellow thermistor leads back the way they were Verify that the right cover can go back on without pinching any wires and that there are no wires anywhere near the large gear or other moving parts Verify that all connectors and wires are now secure Replace the right cover and the lid using the original screws Press the knob onto the volume control shaft being certain that the pointer points straight up to NORMAL when at the center of its rotation range Refer to the text for the checkout procedure Fig 4 How to make the fusion machine modifications through a magic machine where real ink would somehow stick only where the toner already existed Obvious uses would be to get truly dense blacks to be able to provide litho quality images for my printed circuits overheads or for electronic artwork to gain total color options and to provide a durable raised ink thermography process for letter heads for custom business cards and even for use when printing in Braille It turned out that an English outfit by the name of Omnicrom beat me to the punch As figure one now shows us Omnicrom reasoned that toner was really a mixture of black stuff and hot glue You could think of a copy as a piece of paper that
187. each wire will exactly stop at its own respective pin circle Special overlays might later be added such as individual inverter gate or op amp symbols The device number must of course be moved outside the package if you do this These can also be dictionary based Note that the final print quality and the convenience of this routine will dramatically exceed what you can us ually do with any screen oriented drawing program and that you can use this on any make and any model of personal computer Write or call for more info December 1987 dipdraw draws a dip integrated circuit Copyright c 1987 by Don Lancaster amp Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal and non commercial use permitted so long as this header remains intact Enter with currentpoint set to pin 1 and scale set so that 1 0 distance between pins Then do a numpins name hipins lopins dipdraw Pin callouts preceeded by a will get complemented main dipdraw entry dipdraw save snap exch def hipins exch def lopins exch def chipname exch def numpins exch def howlong numpins 2 div cvi 1 add def nhowhigh 4 numpins 36 ge 1 add if def stub howhigh 1 4 sub 2 div def internal service subs start here pinproc numpins 2 div cvi newpath 0 cpos 0 37 0 360 arc gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 0 067 setlinewidth stroke pin 5 string cvs dup stringwidth pop 2 div neg cp
188. eat bb yrd 4 bb neg xrd aa neg yrd cc neg xrd aa yrd repeat bb neg xrd 2 bb neg yrd aa xrd cc neg yrd aa neg xrd repeat closepath stroke windows 425 1025 468 1068 20 568 26 568 37 68 43 68 37 25 43 25 53 5 68 59 568 11 xzdhwindow repeat 26 5 25 20 5 25 10 25 4 25 26 5 68 20 5 68 10 68 4 68 8 yzdhwindow repeat shipping door 20 5 16 xzshippingdoor 54 16 xzshippingdoor chimney 50 26 bldz ppthigh sub brickchimney some lettering Helvetica Bold findfont 9 5 0 0 7 0 0 makefont setfont pixelproc 0 3 6 moveto 0 4 0 SHIPPING ashow def pixelprocwidth 50 def pixelprocheight 10 def 0 0 0 pm 21 6 brickwide mul 0 2 41 2 brickhi mul prm pixellineremap pixelproc 0 3 6 moveto 0 4 0 RECEIVING ashow def pixelprocwidth 70 def 0 0 0 pm 54 8 brickwide mul 0 2 41 2 brickhi mul prm pixellineremap showpage Fig 8 PostScript Language code for the old building 38 6 N Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU May 1988 erry Cline and his great crew at the AZ Apple user group are now putting together a super whiz bang regional computing show and seminar I will be there hosting a PostScript mini course or two for you while Bee will be show ing and telling with lots of hands on stuff for all of you beginning desktop publishers Other galaxy famous dignitaries will include both Roger Wagener and Randy Hyde on machine language and Greg Schaeffer on telecommun ications and possibly even several name
189. ed not be all that expensive The Mod ern Litho people will do all of the photography typesetting mechanical art color seps stripping and printing on a one side four color glossy sheet for a tad over seven cents each In quantities of a few thousand or so Longer runs are even cheaper AS we ve seen in previous col umns on demand laser printing can be more than cost competitive with jiffy printing for smaller press runs particularly if you do not know pre cisely how many copies you are going to sell and especially if there are to be revisions and updates Full details on this have appeared in previous Ask The Guru reprints and you ll be hearing much more on book on demand printing in the future On the other hand if you need a known quantity of modest quality user manuals or any other technical publications at a very low price do check into those Omnipress folks These people use paper plates and shoot and go litho techniques to hold down production costs Their final quality is not all that awful especially for tech manuals The turnaround for fully bound books or manuals can be less than a week The GBC people have announced a new thermal binding scheme that resistance heats the actual glue in the binder rather than needing a fancy toaster like the previous methods do Most of their current binding tools and products are priced out rageously high though so don t get your hopes up on this one This one
190. ed by resettimer starttimer do something stoptimer spin wheels starttimer do something stoptimer reporttimer reporttimer Return measured time to host See resettimer snoop Activate superexec A forall superexec overrides readonly stall Time delay as in 1500 stall Gives host time to respond or record starttimer Begin part of multiple time measurement See resettimer stoptimer End part of multiple time measurement See resettimer stopwatchoff End single time measurement and report to host See resettimer stopwatchon Reset and begin single time measurement See resettimer tan Trig tangent Use yside xside tan Inaccurate very close to 90 degrees tray Return to normal tray feed white Switch to white Same as 1 setgray width A string width finds only the x width of the string yestestpage Restore the test page that is printed on startup Fig 4 Some new PostScript nuisance commands N J by using combinations of previously defined ones So what I have come up with is a new nuisance dictionary that makes doing great heaping bunches of tricky things such as turning off that test page easily done with a single com mand What you do is persistently download this dictionary or else tack it onto anything else you are persis tently downloading on power up From that point forward you can activate all of these new commands with a simple nuisance begin Figure four shows you a detailed list and expla
191. ee eee eee TOOL 01 TOOL LOCATOR 0101 TLBootInit 0601 TLStatus 0D01 SetWAP 1201 TLTextMountVolume 0201 TLStartup 0901 GetTSPtr 0E01 LoadTools 1301 SaveTextState 0301 TLShutDown 0A01 SetTSPtr 0F01 LoadOneTool 1401 RestoreTextState 0401 TLVersion 0B01 GetFuncPtr 1001 UnloadOneTool 1501 MessageCenter 0501 TLReset 0C01 GetWAP 1101 TLMountVolume wrt ee eee eee eee TOOL 02 MEMORY MANAGER 0102 MMBootInit 0B02 RestoreHandle 1B02 FreeMem 2302 HunlockAll 0202 MMStartUp 1002 DisposeHandle 1C02 MaxBlock 2402 SetPurge 0302 MMShutDown 1102 DisposeAll 1D02 TotalMem 2502 SetPurgeAll 0402 MMVersion 1202 PurgeHandle 1E02 CheckHandle 2802 PtrToHand 0502 MMReset 1302 PurgeAll 1F02 CompactMem 2902 HandToPtr 0602 MMStatus 1802 GetHandleSize 2002 HLoc 2A02 HandToHand 0902 NewHandle 1902 SetHandleSize 2102 HLockAll 2B02 BlockMove 0A02 ReallocHandle 1A02 FindHandle 2202 Hunlock TOOL 03 MISCELLANEOUS TOOLS 0103 MTBootInit 0E03 WriteTimeHex 1903 SetMouse 2403 FWEntry 0203 MTStartUp 0F03 ReadAsciiTime 1A03 HomeMouse 2503 GetTick 0303 MTShutDown 1003 SetVector 1B03 ClearMouse 2603 PackBytes 0403 MTVersion 1103 GetVector 1C03 ClampMouse 2703 UnPackBytes 0503 MTReset 1203 SetHeartBeat 1D03 GetMouseClamp 2803 Munger 0603 M
192. ee which of them are actually printing something to the screen or doing disk access Once you crack a sub you will use your cross reference list and the ava lanche effect to begin cracking all the routines that called this sub As you understand the purpose of each instruction you make the usual loads and transfers green the stack pushes or pulls yellow and the stores pink As each portion of the code is understood a stripe is painted down the right side of the page wide green for fully understood code and wide yellow for fully cracked files This lets you keep score and mark your progress Write down everything you learn next to each instruction The innermost secret to the tearing method is to avoid ever doing any thinking or any analysis until the last possible instant Just keep coloring with the hilighters and they will do nearly all of the work for you Well that is sort of a thumbnail sketch of what tearing is all about And yes tearing will work on any make and model of microcomputer Full details appear in Enhance I Have fun with this incredibly pow erful analysis and study tool How do I Refill a Canon SX Toner Cartridge As we have seen in past columns there is now as much as a 15 1 cost penalty in per page toner costs when using those newer Canon SX laser printers over the older CX engines On the older CX cartridges you were able to buy cartridges for five bucks out of your Sunday paper an
193. eed any more input on this What is this month s PostScript utility We will have a pair of them this month The first over in figure six shows you how you might draw a street legal apple that a student of mine needed for some of the shipping crates in her orchard This is a good example of how you can modify existing characters and symbols to create new ones In this case we unbit the apple by printing it backwards on top of itself and used a clipping boundary to get rid of the leaf A new stem was then added by using a single cubic spline While this should be a totally and completely legal image I would still hesitate to use it for any purpose that was even vaguely related to comput ers in any manner This reverse printing stunt is also useful to turn other images around especially the pointing hands of the Zapf Dingbat font Details are left as an excercise for the student One gotcha The bitten apple is available as Symbol code 360 on the LaserWriters but may not be present in non Apple firmware So much for device independence Figure seven is a little something I quickly threw together out of Apple Writer This particular building was chosen because it gets fiendishly difficult to nearly impossible to draw when you use either Ilustrator or Cricket Draw yet it is almost trivial when done using a suprisingly short AppleWriter text file Yes this will translate to other systems Some of
194. een off of which you can do high quality real print ing with real ink onto just about any surface imaginable Even several colors at once if you want to The system materials and how to books are available either from Think Ink or Polycor The system is similar to those old thermal transfer masters Your silk screen is pre coated with a thin and meltable wax Light from several flashbulbs or an old thermal master machine shines through the screen and onto your laser print The black toner parts get hot melt and pick up the wax opening holes in the screen The white parts stay cool and leave December 1989 since black on the print makes holes in the screen which puts ink onto the final page or whatever it is you are the wax on the screen You have a positive acting system printing on Each screen is good for hundreds of impressions S o Copyright c 1989 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 o 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal non commercial use permitted so long as b this header remains present and intact Latest work in progress disk costs 39 50 sege o Requires my gonzo justify and my ps util 1 Free printed copies on request ps util 1 begin printerror nuisance begin landscape fontO NewCenturySchlbk Bold findfont 1 2 0 0 1 4 0 0 makefont setfont def font1 Helvetica Bold findfont 0 7 0 0 0 7 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 Helvetica findfont 0 8 0
195. eerror get def end errordict nandleerror systemdict begin error begin brkpage begin newerror newerror false store error errorname get ioerror ne error command get exec ne or vmstatus pop pop 0 ne grestoreall if initgraphics courier setfont Imargin 720 moveto ERROR prnt errorname prnt nl OQFFENDING COMMAND prnt command load prnt error ostack known nl nl STACK prnt nl nl error ostack get aload length repeat if systemdict showpage get exec newerror true store OLDhandleerror load end end end exec end end end ifelse end end end ifelse dup 0 systemdict put dup 4 brkpage put bind readonly put def Fig 3 Adobe s printing and stack dumping error trapper S 51 3 ASK THE GURU delivers far and away the lowest per page toner costs to the end user We charge 24 for our local CX and SX reloads I can still get away with such an outrageously high price since I do live in a rather remote rural area At any rate if you do insist on a total teardown of a CX cartridge that magic T 10 tamperproof Torx bit you ll need is manufactured by Evco as their 945B700 set and can be got ten through Jensen Tools For punch and go the best way to produce smooth and truely round reloading and draining holes is to use a 3 Unibit from Vice Grip or one of their imitators These are once again available from Jensen Tools or most any of the large electrical contracting supply houses One rather good way to rep
196. efeed esc z Switch to zero paragraph margin starting with next line Fig 4 Currently embeddable gonzo escape commands Ne J This Ask The Guru reprint is done using the gonzo justify You might like to try using one of those heavy name brand layout applications packages to see if you can come up with results that are even remotely this good at 300 DPI We will be seeing lots more use examples in future columns But for now figure five gives you a simple column maker that produces your choice of 1 1 or oversize 1 33 1 col umns The latter can be photoreduced for real printing applications and will dramatically improve the over all smoothness of the characters Figure six gives you some of the text actually used in this column Since some more primitive word processors do not let you embed any escape commands I have replaced each and every escape command with its 033 octal equivalent This listing also does assume your word processor can handle up to a 240 character line without forcing extra carriage returns or linefeeds Additional reverse slash ignore the following carriage return or line feed can be added if needed Note that carriage returns in figure seven are used only after an end of line reverse slash or following each paragraph Extra white vertical space has been added in this figure to help you identify paragraph endings In general the gonzo routines can either be tacked onto each indiv
197. eftstartingname printnames clear leftsnap restore save rightsnap exch def 11 72 mul 2 div 0 translate background 35 2 div 0 3 rightpagenum cc rightstartingname printnames clear rightsnap restore def delimiter So Vo o o def createarray 1000 array brbarray exch def pointer 0 def 0 1 999 brbarray exch put for brblist delimiter search brbarray exch pointer exch put pointer pointer 1 add def pop exit ifelse loop def brblist Aaron A Aardvark 1 First Avenue Alton AL 32768 101 111 1101 AM82 M84 Exp 1 1 90 AAAA Byron B Benson 2 Boyd Boulevard Bismark CA 22021 202 222 2202 M87 88 Dues not paid PAAA Ao This continues for up to 240 names PAAA Ao Zack Zimmerman 99999 Zoraster Trail Zion UT 99909 999 999 9909 FM86 M88 Exp 1 1 94 PAAA AAAA def selections here are sheet81 sheet27 sheet63 or sheet45 sheet63 320 copies generatethepage showpage Fig 4 PostScript code for the intelligent directory 46 4 ASK THE GURU Mucho thanks to that absolutely outstanding Whole Earth Review for putting me onto this great product as they do dozens of other times each issue And thanks to Don Harbolt a winner in our color proofing contest for his valuable input on this An afterthought Could GOCCO be modified so that instead of using a wax some more permanant thermo graphic material that might produce raised print on your laser output Perhaps two
198. eq pop 9 1000 if substitute tab dup 110 eq pop more true def exit if end string on linefeed dup 114 eq pop more true def exit if end string on return dup 48 ge dup 55 le dooctal if if 1000 eq pop 1 sub dup 1 add 0 ifelse substitute or replicate def dooctal 48 sub 64 mul oct exch def currentfile read not pop more false def exit if dup 48 ge dup 55 le dothird 1000 ifelse if def dothird 48 sub 8 mul oct add oct exch def currentfile read not pop more false def exit if dup 48 ge dup 55 le 48 sub oct add if 1000 if def exitproc pop currentfile read not pop more false def exit if dup exitchar eq pop exit exch scanstr exch 27 put exch 1 add dup 3 1 roll ifelse def default font and variable list for drop caps fontO Helvetica Bold findfont 40 0 0 40 0 0 makefont setfont def regular text font1 Helvetica findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 Helvetica BoldOblique findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def font3 Helvetica Bold findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def slightly smaller for numbers and caps in text font4 Helvetica findfont 8 0 0 8 0 0 makefont setfont def font5 Helvetica BoldOblique findfont 8 0 0 8 0 0 makefont setfont def font6 Helvetica Bold findfont 8 0 0 8 0 0 makefont setfont def lowered title line font7 Helvetica Bold findfont 900904 superscript and subscript font8 Helvetica Bold fi
199. erJet to LaserWriter mod Book publishing on demand PostScript intelligent directory The GOCCO silk screen process PC Transporter first look PostScript intelligent tabs LaserWriter NTX defects list Simple white noise generator Printer and printing resources The tearing method SX cartridge refilling PostScript font bitmaps Some thick paper ploys Colorease and Identicolor Ask the Guru Secret non putrid grays Sources of ticket blanks Gonzo justify templates Those 1300 LaserWriters WPL font selection routine The great Pellon ploy Developer Resources LaserTalk on the Mac PostScript spirograph A 57600 baud interface Secret toner refill tools PostScript error trapper A serious AppleTalk bug Mini DIN 8 serial cabling Beginners two up notepads A low cost jogger Die cut laser forms Ultra fast PostScript Several GS OS bugs Apple authored books Video overlay card Pad printing secrets The safety pin method PostScript curvetracing PC Clone LaserWriter use Toner to litho plates NTX hard disk secrets PostScript rope a dope Returning font bitmaps Rebuilding crashed disks Those IIgs mentor programs PostScript charts and graphs Book on demand publishing Avoiding NTX disk blowups Unusual graphic arts goodies Foreign power supplies LaserWriter networking Profits from Post It notes Working with Bezier curves PostScript avuncular sleezoids A PostScript fractal fern Transfer toner for T shirts BASIC
200. ere is on the traditional electronic circuits and hardware A reminder that we have this great PostScript BBS going great guns at 409 244 4704 There are now several hundred free downloads available plus a bunch of new services Some are free while many of the others are real bargains Sponsors are more than welcome Let us start off with some real fundamental stuff for any and all of you newcomers What is a Patch A patch is some alteration that somebody has decided to make in a computer program for one reason or another The patch might cure an obvious and major problem or it can add a new feature or it may simply do something that is philosophically different from the original author s personal intensions Patches can be both very good and very bad Any patch no matter how carefully done or how extensively thought out can destroy the integrity of a program And multiple patches can easily interfere with each other in wierd and infuriatingly subtle ways As practically all of the better selling programs available today run in machine language the patches also most often have to be made as ma chine language changes in the final object code used at run time Rule number one in making any program patch is to patch ONLY a newly made backup copy of your program NEVER patch the original factory disk Rule number two is to make sure the patch is intended for the par ticular version of the code you are curre
201. ering on the print density dial is just plain wrong It should also be outside adjustable 9 The paper tray is still far too shallow One ream plus a hundred pages is the absolute minimum 10 Envelope print quality while greatly improved is still marginal 11 The PostScript frametofile command is conspicuously absent 12 Many PostScript functions notably eexec cexec superexec and FIxProc among others are improperly documented 13 The font lockout on pathforall is a second inexcusable atrocity 14 There is no video output nor any way of accessing final bitmaps 15 Hard disk usage is unnecessarily restrictive 16 AppleTalk is often ridiculously slower than standard serial access 17 Recent speedup techniques including the 68030 the Weitek RISC chip and new firmware leave the NTX as a rather slow machine 18 The 150 so called required AppleTalk cables can be replaced with an ordinary 5 printer cable for many users much of the time 19 AppleTalk is not device independent it treats newline characters different than does the serial comm channels 20 The NTX costs too much Fig 2 Defects in the LaserWriter NTX J 47 2 ASK THE GURU certainly does a lot more than the limited demands I ve asked of it So Pll hold off on giving you a thorough review just yet The beast works and works well and solves a lot of problems for me Nuff said Don t miss the egress This way to the egress
202. et s first do a summer rerun of the attack of the killer cables How do I Convert from Mini DIN 8 to DB25 There are three popular serial com munications standards in use today These are RS232 RS422 and RS423 Each is different in their signal levels and in their choice of connectors The older RS232 standard normally uses a DB25 connector and normally has bipolar signal levels of 5 volts for a logic one and 5 volts for the logic zero The RS422 standard often may use the DB9 or a Mini DIN 8 connector This standard provides for balanced inputs and outputs As an example there is a TXD output and a TXD output These are complementary so one goes high as the other goes low There is also a RXD and RXD input pair Logic is sensed as the differ ential current between these pins The RS423 standard is a single ended version of RS422 that lets you get by with fewer wires at somewhat IIgs modem D RS423 RS232 mini DIN 8 male DB25 male DTR Ok DTR DSR DSR TxD GQ no RxD G Q RXD DCD DCD se 4 7 sG RXD 8 TXD O n c L Fig 2 A Ilgs serial cable for MODEM use J 51 2 lower noise distance and speed per formance To convert from RS422 to RS423 you use the TXD output and leave the TXD output unconnected You then use the RXD input and connect the RXD input to a reference level that is halfway between the one and zero levels For instance if
203. etCt1Value 1110 HiLiteControl 1A10 GetCtl1Value 1210 CtilNewRes 1B10 SetCtlParams 1310 FindControl 1C10 GetCtlParams 1410 TestControl 1D10 DragRect wr eee ee eee eee eee eee TOOL 11 SYSTEM LOADER 0511 LoaderReset 0B11 LoadSegNum 0611 LoaderStatus 0C11 UnloadSegNum 0911 InitiallLoad 0D11 LoadSegName 0A11 Restart 0E11 UnloadSeg were eee eee ee eee eee eee TOOL 12 QUICKDRAW AUXILIARY 0312 QDAuxShutDown 0512 QDAuxReset 0412 QDAuxVersion 0612 QDAuxStatus were ee ee ee ee eee eee eee eee ee TOOL 13 PRINT MANAGER 0A13 PrValidate 1113 PrClosePage 0B13 PrStlDialog 1213 PrPicFile 0C13 PrJdobDialog 1413 PrError 0D13 PrPixelMap 1513 PrSetError 0E13 PrOpenDoc 1613 PrChoosePrinter SOF13 PrCloseDoc 1913 LLDStartUp 1013 PrOpenPage 1A13 LLDShutDown EDITOR 0B14 LESetText 1314 LECopy 0C14 LEIdle 1414 LEPaste 0D14 LEClick 1514 LEDelete 0E14 LESetSelect 1614 LEInsert 0F14 LEActivate 1714 LEUpdate 1014 LEDeactivate 1814 LETextBox 1114 LEKey 1914 LEFromScrap 1214 LECut 1A14 LEToScrap were eee eee eee eee TOOL 15 DIALOG MANAGER 1015 IsDialogEvent 1E15 GetControlDItem 1115 DialogSelect 1F15 GetItext 1215 DlgCut 2015 SetIText 1315 DlgCopy 2115 SelectIText 1415 DlgPaste 2215 HideDIItem 1515 DlgDelete 2315 ShowDItem 1615 DrawDialog 2415 FindDItem 1715 Alert 2515 UpdateDialo
204. etPrinter Reset_Tabs initjob initpage hexout and doCmd Character swap routines follow as needed for each language Various interpreting and control definitions are next in turn followed by formfeed carriage return backspace tabs and character width stuff A tab dictionary is defined to remember tab positions This includes a sort routine to put the tabs in order An escape dictionary is defined to handle all of the escape sequences being emulated and their service routines All dictionaries are closed and the program is terminated Fig 1 A summary of the IWEM imagewriter emulator text file J Postscript boxifier Laser printing papers New BASIC for the IIgs AppleTalk cable substitutes Monochrome HIRES graphics LaserWriter or that up to 150 worth of custom cables are required to use AppleTalk at all Neither of these myths are true The LaserWriter can easily by driven by any serial port from any computer Under certain circumstances serial communication can take place as much as seven times faster than with AppleTalk As we will see below if you really do want to use AppleTalk there are all sorts of free to 5 alternatives to those 150 cables The Tidbits purportedly have a list of Apple II publications but they do omit Open Apple which is far and away the best and most important resource of them all Both Apple Assembly Line and Call A P P L E are also incredibly omitted So is the InCider magazine
205. evelopment system on the Mac are good places to start using C Both of these are now available through APDA What about UNIX or A UX While UNIX is written in C I personally feel that a It is insanely bloated b It is already hopelessly obsolete and c anything that AT amp T is in favor of has got to be suspect Let s see There is a new version 3 2 system master disk for the IIgs More on this shortly The bottom line is that their printer driver improve ments are far too little done far too late but that there s lots of other neat stuff included in the upgrade Quite a few of you helpline callers have been asking for methods to run PostScript on the low end dot matrix printers Well to do so would be the equivalent of putting a new Porsche engine onto a skateboard Nonetheless the LaserGo people are the first ones out with such a product Right now it is mainly for IBM use but Apple versions are cer tain to follow Apple Computer does have a few special interest publications that you might want to be aware of For you developers there is their Viewpoints newsletter and their Outside Apple quarterly magazine For all of you bureaucrats check into Innovations For librarians there is the Apple Library User s Group and among their many educational publications Wheels for the Mind is just about the best Meanwhile Adobe Systems has a free Font and Function typography catalog out that includes some
206. everything is working properly Finally you also have to replace the wiper pad over on the fusion roller assembly Carve the old white pad out of its black holder with a screwdriver and drop a new one in place Secure it with white glue Yes you can also refill the copier cartridges but this takes a different toner using a slightly different tech nique But under no circumstances should you try to use laser printer toner in a copier or vice versa The two toners are totally different The new SX cartridges can also be refilled but there are problems at present The drum here is much smaller and much less scratch re sistant Very often the SX drum will scratch even before a first refill is even possible However if you take a brand new SX cartridge and remove all of the factory toner from it and then add a suitable drum lubricant and a third party refill toner you can easily get several refills without any scratches April 1988 Now not even the most die hard of cynics would conclude that a com pany would purposely implant some abrasive into their toner to grind up their own drums just to deprive their own end users of the highest possible image quality at the lowest cost On the other hand it is painfully obvious that several rather simple changes in toner chemistry can be made that could dramatically reduce the SX drum scratching So for right now the SX cartridge per page toner costs are substantially hig
207. ext in side it in big type Any excerpts are intended to slow down the browsing reader and draw him into stopping and actually reading the entire text Many of the popular page making programs make excerpts very easy to do Sadly excerpts end up grossly overused Excerpts are also a copout since the real artwork that should go there takes more skill to produce If all else fails you can throw in some innane block of text with a Tell Me All About Copy Fitting ti tle or something equally stupid What is This Month s PostScript Utility February sure was a short month Which means I didn t quite finish the dramatic PostScript speedup stuff I promised you So I thought I would ease off and throw in a couple of lighter topics here We ll get back to the heavy stuff next month By the way some of the goodies currently stuck in the pipe include that dramatic PostScript speedup that completely eliminates page makeup time improved curve tracing for such things as engineering graphs and charts auto form fillers and auto invoicers that include spreadsheet capabilities a powerful badge and bumpersticker generator an exitable and reenterable Diablo letter legal portrait landscape emulator some improved multiple border procs new compiling routines automatic file and system translators PostScript analog emulations of state variable filters and great heaping bunches of simple beginner stuff Anyhoo figure three is
208. eyond increasing or decreasing the number of words and all their lengths PostScript does make it very easy to change the total number of lines per column or lines per page So one simple ploy is to simply stretch or squash the ledding between lines A one point difference either way can give you as much as 200 points of adjustment on a three column layout A little bit of this will usually be unnoticable But it is far and away the best to keep the stretch or squash the same for columns on any given page or across any two page spread And you always want to return to whatever normal is just as quickly as you possibly can The size and the amount of white space in all your figures can give you the greatest control Text in figures can be made larger or smaller as needed You might also stretch or crowd the borders a tad Another obvious ploy is to stretch or squash any title or subhead white space I do this in my LaserWriter Corner column which absolutely has to be one Computer Shopper page high The bullets between each topic have programmable white space that automatically stretches or squashes for an exactly fit Two useful tricks that can eat up lots of white space are the sidebar and the excerpt The sidebar is any words in a box trick that covers an alike but different somehow topic that amplifies your main theme or gives some tutorial background The excerpt is a two rule box with a key phrase from the main t
209. f brickhi 2 5 def brickwide 8 def numbricksx 67 5 def numbricksy 34 5 def numbricksz 108 def bldz numbricksz brickhi mul def bldx numbricksx brickwide mul def bldy numbricksy brickwide mul def main building outline 000 pm bldx blidy bldz pbox sunken roof insetbaseshade 0 9 def insetwallshade 1 def pptwide 10 def ppthigh 10 def pptwide dup bldz prm bldx pptwide 2 mul sub bldy pptwide 2 mul sub ppthigh xyinset add bricks to the walls save brickhold exch def 0 0 0 pm numbricksx numbricksz 4 sub xzbrickwall 000 pm numbricksy numbricksz 4 sub yzbrickwall clear brickhold restore the floor slab 000 pm 14 brickhi mul zrm bldx 2 brickhi mul xzrect 0 0 0 pm 14 brickhi mul zrm bldy 2 brickhi mul yzrect columns 000 pm 16 brickwide mul 0 5 brickwide neg mul 0 prm 4 2 5 brickwide mul 0 5 brickwide mul bldz pbox 16 5 brickwide mul xrm repeat 0 0 0 pm 0 5 brickwide neg mul 16 brickwide mul 0 prm 2 0 5 brickwide mul 2 5 brickwide mul bldz pbox 16 5 brickwide mul yrm repeat 0 0 0 pm 0 5 brickwide mul neg dup 0 prm 2 5 brickwide mul bldz xzrect 0 0 0 pm 0 5 brickwide mul neg dup 0 prm 2 5 brickwide mul bldz yzrect topwall aa brickwide 0 5 mul def bb brickwide 2 5 mul def cc brickwide 14 mul def newpath 0 0 0 pm gsave bldz zrm bldx xrd bidy yrd bldx neg xrd closepath 1 setgray stroke grestore 0 0 0 pm aa neg aa neg bidz prm 4 bb xrd aa yrd cc xrd aa neg yrd repeat bb xrd 2 bb yrd aa neg xrd cc yrd aa xrd rep
210. f this they have acheived the coveted Synergetics ZZZ rating even bottoming the ZZZ rating now uniquely held by Bell Electronics Sun assured me that they stocked ProDos AppleWriter 2 1 along with all the original manuals In reality they have the old and largely useless DOS 3 3 AppleWriter with Xeroxed info sheets instead of real manuals Why do I continue to make such a fuss over an older word processor Because I strongly feel that Apple Writer with suitable mods is far and away the finest program available to day anywhere for any serious desktop publishing use On any computer An unintentional experiment did tend to dramatically support all my views on this Seems I started up this beginner s PostScript and desktop publishing course here at EAC The focus of the course was to have the walk in students quickly and simply grind out such things as letterheads business cards invoices note paper advertisements badges newsletters logos bumperstickers reports draw ings resume s and such All real world all here and now And all done on bare metal and host independent word processed PostScript helped along with a few of my power tools The no nothing and off the street beginners were all given a ProDOS Developer resources The great Pellon ploy LaserTalk on the Mac PostScript spirograph A 57600 baud interface AppleWriter 2 1 and a IIe while the sophisticated power users had their choice of any software
211. fied you isolate it as a string variable and then present it to the October 1988 To prepare the text you will want gonzojustify routine along with the position information the choice of present font and your choice for the S name of textfile guru temp 1 Ask the Guru template OARS SAT requires gonzo dl 2 persist true def makeitbig false def persist serverdict begin 0 exitserver if setscale makeitbig scalefactor 4 3 div def 50 300 translate scalefactor dup scale ybotcorrect 200 def scalefactor 1 def 0 0 translate scalefactor dup scale ybotcorrect 0 def ifelse def colcheck ypos ybot ybotcorrect add le showpage setscale header ypos ytop def ystart ytop def if def header fontsave fontn 4 get def save hdrsnap exch def pm 0 def yparendadj 0 def xpos headerx def xpos1 xpos def yposO headery def ypos ypos0 def txtwide headerwide def headertitle gonzojustify ypos ypos yinc add def pagenum 20 string cvs dup num exch def stringwidth pop numwide exch def page dup stringwidth pop numwide add xpos txtwide add sub neg ypos moveto show num show hdrsnap restore fontsave changefont pagenum pagenum 1 add def def fontO Times Bold findfont 54 0 0 54 0 32 makefont setfont def font1 Times Roman findfont 9 75 0 0 9 75 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 Times ltalic findfont 9 75 0 0 9 75 0 0 makefont setfont def font3 Times Bold findfont 9 75 0 0 9 75 0 6 makefont setfont def fo
212. fine the following with or without a dictionary mainbproc cornerbproc auxbproc maindeltax maindeltay auxdeltax auxdeltay cornerdeltax cornerdeltay breductionfactor enter with bordleft bordwidth bordtop bordheight bordthick drawsymmetricborder drawsymmetricborder approxscale exch def bordheight exch def bordtop exch def bordwidth exch def bordleft exch def bordwidth bordwidth breductionfactor 2 mul approxscale mul sub def bordheight bordheight breductionfactor 2 mul approxscale mul sub def bordtop bordtop breductionfactor approxscale mul sub def bordleft bordleft breductionfactor approxscale mul add def this calculates the approximate width needed bordwidth approxscale div cornerdeltax sub cornerdeltay sub maindeltax sub maindeltax auxdeltax add div trialfitx exch def this adjusts the scale for an almost exact fit trialfitx ceiling cvi numx exch def trialfitx dup ceiling div approxscale mul exactxscale exch def this adjusts the xscale for a main more exacter fit bordwidth cornerdeltax cornerdeltay add maindeltax numx 1 add mul add auxdeltax numx mul add exactxscale mul div exactxscale mul exactxscale exch def this calculates the approximate height needed bordheight approxscale div cornerdeltay sub cornerdeltax sub maindeltax sub maindeltay auxdeltay add div trialfity exch def this adjusts the scale for an almost exact fit trialfity ceiling cvi numy exch def trialfity dup ceiling div approxsca
213. for each address If eight bytes are presented in a row on the screen these will correspond to eight sequential addresses in a row Ferinstance a 4F98 A9 03 CF F4 29 51 8D 44 means that you have a hex 51 in hex address 4F9D To change a single byte you type the address followed by a colon a space the new hex data value and a carriage return As an example a 2D34 EA lt return gt will put the hex value EA in address location 2D34 You can also enter multiple or sequential values at one time up to several dozen or more by doing a 2D34 EA 12 34 FC F577 The quickest and best summary of dealing with machine language does appear in chapter seven of the old user manual for the Apple II This topic is also covered in the IIe and IIc technical manuals and in the Igs 33 2 Firmware Reference Manual These are available from A P D A Or for more background check into my Micro Cookbook volumes I and II or my Apple Assembly Cook book For more specific AppleWriter patches check the ATG reprints or my AppleWriter Cookbook What is PostScript I can not believe the number of phone calls I got over my Show and Tell stuff starting on page 399 of the September CS asking some really fundamental questions on PostScript I thought I had long ago beat all these questions to death right here in this ATG column So all of you regular ATG junkies please bear with me one more time while we go over
214. g 1815 StopAlert 2615 GetDIItemType 1915 NoteAlert 2715 SetDItemType S1A15 CautionAlert 2815 GetDItemBox 1B15 ParamText 2915 SetDItemBox 1C15 SetDAFont 2A15 GetFirstDItem enuBootInit enuStartUp MenuShutDown enuVersion MenuReset enuStatus MenuKey GetMenuBar enuRefresh FlashMenuBar InsertMenu DeleteMenu InsertMItem DeleteMItem Ct1BootInit Ct1lStartUp Ct1lShutDown CtlVersion CtlReset CtiStatus NewControl DisposeControl KillControl LoaderInit LoaderStartUp LoaderShutDown LoaderVersion QDAuxBootInit QDAuxStartUp PMBootInit PMStartUp PMShutDown PMVersion PMReset PMStatus PrDefault LEBootInit LEStartUp LEShutDown LEVersion LEReset LEStatus LENew LEDispose DialogBootInit DialogStartUp DialogShutDown DialogVersion DialogReset DialogStatus ErrorSound NewModalDialog NewModelessDlog CloseDialog NewDItem RemoveDItem ModalDialog NewMenu DisposeMenu InitPalette EnableMItme CheckMItem SetMItemMark Get ItemMark SetMItemStyle GetMItemStyle SetMenuID SetMItemID SetMenuBar SetMItemName DisaleMItem GrowSize GetCt1DPage SetCtlAction GetCtlAction SetCtlRefCon GetCt1lRefCon EraseControl DrawOneCtl GetLoadSegInfo LGetPathName UserShutDown CopyPixels WaitCursor LLDControl LLDControl LLDText PrDriverVer PrPortVer Fig 3 Numeric order list of Ilgs tools part 3 LEScrapHandle LEGetScrapLen LEScrapLen LESetHilite L
215. g en vironment never did seem to get it self properly addressed One most interesting sidelight of the conference was the tour of Bill Mensch s Western Design Center Some of the finest and the most innovative new microprocessor de signs in the world come from this family operation all done out of a remodeled home The dozen or so employees have time and again outperformed all of Motorola and Intel combined This is the home of the Apple IIgs CPU Unlike some other companies I better not mention WDC actually uses the products they design for all of their day to day operations All the Calma development stations and the Versatec plotters are ultimately controlled by Apple IIgs computers Besides having some new 32 bit 65832 chips and some other unmen tionable goodies in the works WDC has a brand new in circuit 65XXX emulator ICE board product that can leap tall buildings in a single bound While emphatically and positively not promoted as such this ICE is the Apple software pirate s dream tool It flat out defeats 100 percent of all known forms of all program software protection to date Few people realize that derivatives of the original 6502 chip are far and away the best selling microcomputers in the world today The big players are Sony who uses zillions of these in all their VCR s and whatever the Mitsubishi folks with an extensive line of semi custom devices check out their super whiz bang M50734 the
216. g false def if dup length 1 It pop if dup linestring exch def length 1 sub Islen exch def lastparline false def sparechange 0 def startfirstline linestring 2 index 1 getinterval dup gt stringwidth pop sub charstretch sub dup 0 It spaces 0 eq 1 index oktohere exch def ssok true def if ssok createss if justx cvx exec if dup eq spaceproc otherproc ifelse ifelse exch 1 add dup Islen gt exit exch ifelse loop lastparline true def ssok true def dup oktohere exch def exch dup sparechange exch def ssok createss if justx cvx exec ypos ypos yparendadj sub def def yparendadj 0 def fillsubstrings routines to create and fill the ssarray ssarray 25 array bind def creates the array at load time colcheck def default bottom of page check startnewline ssa 0 def xpos1 xpos indentcount 0 gt pm add if def shiftproc xpos1 ypos moveto true def ssok true def spaces 0 def chars 0 def linestring oktohere get dup 10 eq pop 32 if 32 eq oktohere oktohere 1 add dup Islen ge 1 sub if def exit ifelse loop ssstart oktohere def pop pop ssstart 1 sub txtwide indentcount 0 gt pm sub indentcount indentcount 1 sub def if def startfirstline ssa 0 def xpos1 xpos pm add def ssstart 0 def ssok true def shiftproc xpos1 ypos moveto true def spaces 0 def chars 0 def ssstart txtwide pm sub bind def newshiftproc shiftproc false def def indentcount 0 def createss oktohere
217. g you lots of extra money A reminder that yours truly and a bunch of other Apple incindiaries uh better make that luminaries will be talking and seminaring and show ing and telling at the stupendous AzApple Fiesta at the Safari Hotel in Scottsdale Arizona on June 11th and 12th For more details you might contact Jerry Cline over at AzApple via 602 264 3800 And it looks like its time to try and keep Canis Lupus away from the door again So the usual reminders that we have bound sets of my Ask the Guru reprints available along with my Introduction to PostScript video and my new PostScript Show and Tell which is available for most popular personal computers Also some brand new PostScript language packages one for printed circuit layout and another for two point perspective drawing Write or call if you are interested Let s start with a summer rerun How can I Use the Old 20 Pin Drives On a IIgs We have had a lot of calls on this recently so let s do a rerun Figure one shows you how to build a dual old drive adaptor that lets you daisy chain the original 20 pin 5 1 4 inch Apple drives onto the IIgs 3 1 2 drive 19 pin output connectors Note particularly that pin 4 must be grounded and a pullup resistor is recommended as shown Also be very careful to use shrouded or other wise restrained connectors If you wrongly plug a 5 1 4 drive in so it is offset by one pin or by one pin row you can instan
218. gland Life for half an hour I d guess speeches in Boston are all sup posed to be dull Oh well I d say nice try only it isn t Apple has also introduced a new version of UNIX for the Mac called A UX The language is a mere 50 megabytes in length and easily fits on seventy 3 1 2 inch disk sides The pocket reference card that goes with it costs 650 and is tersely crammed into fourteen oversize volumes of a mere 6000 total pages Apple has just announced a new CD ROM drive that is priced at 1200 Probably the first disks you might expect will be PostScript fonts from Adobe the writer s tools from Microsoft a few major library refer ence works including Books in Print clip art for desktop publishing some outstanding utilities supplied by the BMUG user group and perhaps a motley collection or two of the worst and poorest of the burgeoning Hyper card stackware I am not sure just yet but this should work on a Ile or IIgs having a SCSI interface card installed Stay tuned for more details It will require some time before any genuinely useful CD ROM disks become widely distributed at sane prices A national phone directory would sure be nice as would a com plete history of all stock prices What I am ultimately waiting for though are the USGS topo maps on disk This one may take a while So will the printer Sigh Expect some sort of a super secret IIgs upgrade real soon now with a higher
219. h def ypos exch def 5000 sub xpos exch def txtwide 5000 def justx justR def msg gonzojustify snapcr restore def more Fig 2A My PostScript gonzo justify routines 44 3 ASK THE GURU Va cr save snapcr exch def msg exch def ypos exch def 5000 sub xpos exch def txtwide 5000 def justx justR def msg gonzojustify snapcr restore def end of gonzo justify begin scan converter The gonzo justify routines expect input as delimited strings and use the escape character for commands An input scan converter can be used for character substitution to redefine the escape character or to solve system problems 6000 string scanstr exch def exitchar 120 def for esc x loop exit escsubchar 33 def for use escape as is startgonzo clear more false def 1 1 add dup currentfile read not pop exit if dup 92 eq rslashproc if dup 10 eq pop more true def exit if dup escsubchar eq pop 27 if bypass as comment if not used dup 27 eq exitproc if scanstr 3 1 roll put loop scanstr exch 0 exch getinterval gonzojustify pop more not exit if loop bind def rslashproc pop currentfile read not pop more false def exit if dup 41 eq 1000 if replicate right paren dup 40 eq 1000 if replicate left paren dup 92 eq 1000 if replicate reverse slash dup 98 eq pop 8 1000 if substitute bs dup 102 eq pop 12 1000 if substitute formfeed dup 116
220. h dup mul sub sqrt exch pop atan def yside hypot asin backwards 612 0 translate 1 1 scale print backwards baud 1200 d 25 1200 25 4 dobaud def baud 1200 x 25 1200 25 0 dobaud def baud 9600 d 25 9600 25 4 dobaud def baud 9600 x 25 9600 25 0 dobaud def baud 19200 d 25 19200 25 4 dobaud def baud 19200 x 25 19200 25 0 dobaud def baud 38400 d 25 38400 25 4 dobaud def baud 38400 x 25 38400 25 0 dobaud def baud 57600 d 25 57600 25 4 dobaud def baud 57600 x 25 57600 25 0 dobaud def bestgray 106 45 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen def 106 line black 0 setgray def lightgray 0 99 setgray def white 1 setgray def blackflash 0 0 moveto 1000 0 rlineto 0 1000 rlineto 1000 0 rlineto closepath fill showpage def black pre page for highest print quality copies copies exch def def as in 6 copies dobaud serverdict begin 0 exitserver statusdict begin 3 copy setsccbatch setsccinteractive end quit def used by baud commands feetfirst 180 rotate 612 792 translate def eject print feet first inch 72 mul def pixel 72 mul 300 div def 300 dpi only indiagray 135 35 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen def 133 screen landscape 90 rotate 792 0 translate def pick landscape printing listfonts FontDirectory pop flush 200 37 sin pop repeat forall def fonts to host longjob statusdict waittimeout 180 put def lengthen job timeout manual
221. have just upgraded the IIgs operating system and are now agressively hiring a big bunch of new top quality Apple II people Apple IIc Ile and IIgs end user and devel oper support is far and away the best it has ever been The same goes for Apple s own publications and tech info Those new big machine prod ucts from third parties such as the improved AppleWorks PC Transpor ter and the great new GEOS graphics environment are coming on line and making a big splash On the other hand Apple has been witholding the IIgs upgrade and they purposely crippled that recent IIc upgrade by keeping AppleTalk and a real time clock off it And the intro duction of a Mac K 12 is imminent As I see it there is only one fatal flaw in the IIgs And that lies in all of the monumental costs the incredible time delays rude surprises and the Printer and printing resources inexcusable frustration levels that are involved in that APW development environment If you have to go to all that innane nonsense then you might as well be doing it all on a Mac At present any serious IIgs commercial software development appears to be a sucker bet because of the sheer frus tration problems involving APW The long term handwriting is on the wall Apple now has a secret new machine in the works known as the Brooklyn Bridge that runs both Mac and IIgs software side by side Actually if you think about it for a while the day of the custom operat
222. he actual image drawing one piece of one scan line at a time drawhlinemap hlinearray exch def gsave 0 setlinewidth 0 setlinecap 72 300 div dup scale 0 3 hlinearray length 1 sub cvi vlp exch def hlinearray vip get hlinearray vip 1 add get moveto hlinearray vip 2 add get 0 rlineto stroke for grestore def createbitmap creates an empty bitmap of all zeros to be later filled from a vlinemap or hlinemap array Predefine pixellines and pixelsperline Then call createbitmap createbitmap pixelsperline exch def pixellines exch def bitmap pixellines pixelsperline mul 8 div cvi array def 0 1 bitmap length 1 sub bitmap exch 0 cvi put for def setpixel sets a single bit in a bitmap Enter with bitposition setpixel setpixel cvi dup 8 div floor cvi exch 8 cvi mod 1 index bitmap exch get exch 128 exch neg bitshift or bitmap 3 1 roll put def vlinetobitmap adds a vlinemap array of form XO YO DYO X1 Y1 DY1 XN YN DYN into an already exiting bitmap vlinetobitmap blist exch def 0 1 blist length 3 div cvi 1 sub ptr exch def blist ptr 3 mul get xshift sub pixelsperline mul blist ptr 3 mul 1 add get yshift sub add strt exch def strt 1 blist ptr 3 mul 2 add get strt add 1 sub cvi setpixel for for def bitmaptohost returns an existing bitmap to the host computer for capture and further use bstall 60 37 sin pop repeat def lengthens host recording time bitmaptohost bitmap 16 cvrs dup length 1 eq 0
223. he cure is either very simple or insanely difficult Just make backup copies of all affected software and then replace the backup ProDOS file with a copy of the P 8 file on the IIgs system master disk that has been re named ProDOS Be sure to have lots of fun doing this on any locked and protected disks from now defunct companies There are some subtle differences between P 8 and the older versions of ProDOS but the chances are these will not be a big problem for you If you are using a clock card that links to ProDOS you might want to contact the manufacturer or your user group for more details What is the the latest on the Tech Tidbits Well they still refuse to admit that LocalTalk is not at all needed for the LaserWriter and that it often slows you down bunches and will severely limit your choice of host computer April 1988 This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 version AWD SYS The patch allows printing on a Ilgs by defeating any attempts at setting serial data values to a non existant 6551 port chip It works by trashing the i d bytes for the super serial card and by aborting any O J 1 Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter version 2 1 Plainly label this disk FOR IIGS ONLY 2 Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to reach the monitor 3 BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 4 vere 23 Ilgs patch for ProDOS Applewriter 2 1 poy RO PP N E 6020 T 0C D2 J Kori A
224. he first unique thing you might offer is immediate service on totally custom business cards delivered here and now The second thing you can offer is a very low total price say 5 for 48 cards The third thing you can offer is virtually any graphic image at all on their custom card For instance how many printers can sell you custom business cards that have maps on them Yet there are literally millions of people who d like to buy a few dozen Here s how to get to our house cards for their own personal or family use Most any swap meet or fair should be full of them Figure four does show you a typical example And a fourth thing you can offer is unusual finishes and styles You might use a fancy mother of pearl card stock Kroy Kolor it a bright metallic blue and seal it in plastic for around a dime a card Coburn is one source of unusual materials The durability of the toner can be improved in several ways First it is probably good enough by itself for those quick and dirty throwaway cards that are distributed in larger quantities But a toner business card will self destruct if it is carried in a wallet or is otherwise scuffed The simpliest way to improve the durability of toner is to run it back through the printer a second time iron it or send it through a Kroy Kolor machine If you do this while in contact with a thin sheet of mylar such as an empty Kroy Kolor carier the image will Bakerize and both
225. he other Computer Shopper readers What is the INH Problem On the Apple IIgs Basically there is a really major screwup in the Apple IIgs hardware that makes use of the INH inhibit line by a plug in card difficult and some times impossible What happens is that INH will only work in certain memory ranges and will cause a memory contention fight in others Specifically some real bad memory contention and a system blowup and possible damage might happen if you do lower INH while addressing 6000 9FFF in main mem ory or if you address 0000 5FFF or A000 FFF in auxiliary memory It is possible to destroy the MEGA II chip if you try this More details on this in the IIgs Technical Note 32 from your local user group or BBS Where can I get Apple III Help Outside of it being obscenely over priced monumentally mismarketed poorly assembled at first and woe fully underdocumented the Apple II wasn t all that bad a machine The III was to be that great Ile killer along with Lisa and a few other machines whose names I don t recall In fact the III still does see lots of use in community college admin istrative work and every once in a while one will show up at a bargain price Their 3 Easy Pieces a fore runner of AppleWorks does remain a useful integrated word processor spreadsheet and data base I get a suprisingly high number of helpline calls on the Apple II It turns out there is a gang called On Thre
226. he panel LED should start blinking a dim green and the internal fusion lamp should come on After one minute the fusion lamp should go out and the LED should change to a continuous green Advance the temperature control clockwise by one quarter of a turn The fusion lamp should come on for three or four seconds Retard the temperature control fully counterclockwise and then wait a few minutes Eventually the fusion lamp should come back on for a few seconds When the lamp goes back off then advance the control by one quarter turn The fusion lamp should go back on again for a few seconds If all of these tests are passed center the temperature control and try a metallic Kroy Kolor sheet Use the normal setting for metallic foils a somewhat higher setting for the matte colors and a slightly lower setting for the laminating film Some users report better feeding with the exit rollers depowered Try both powered and unpowered and see which you like better Here s another tip If you run a toner copy through the machine in contact with a thin sheet of polyester mylar film or by using an empty Kroy Kolor carrier your copy will Bakerize giving you a more durable blacker and a semi gloss finish This is handy for such things as quick and dirty business cards and is a zero cost process Among many other sources these surplus Canon fuser units are now available by way of Arlin Shepard at Lazer Products Modificatio
227. heir act on the SX cartridges that go into them both the NT and the NTX are history Dead meat Color them gone At present there is as much as a 15 1 per page toner cost penalty for using the newer LaserWriters when compared to the original LaserWriter and the LaserWriter Plus And yes all those older machines are just as black when they are on their second or third refill using a good third party toner source Which means that the NT and NTX are currently totally useless for any serious production work I have been forced to go back to my older Laser Writers for all my book on demand printing and for most of my other production work Others seem to be doing the same AS we ve seen in several previous columns you can get LaserWriter or LaserWriter Plus toner costs down into the 0 3 cents per page range The NT and the NTX currently will often cost out at a nickel per page or even substantially higher More to the point there is a 5 1 per page toner cost penalty compared to the competing NEC LC890 user refill able PostScript laser printer that is currently running away with all of the marbles and then some Forgetting temporarily about the Canon SX cartridges being obscenely overpriced my own experiences with these cartridges do reflect the many valid complaints I ve been receiving Here s what is happening I bought five brand new Canon SX cartridges directly from Apple The first cartridge ran out of tone
228. her than CX toner costs They also are likely to stay that way at least for a while More on this as the drama unfolds Tell me all About Perspective Transformations As you found out last month I ve been having a lot of fun lately with all of my new perspective drawing routines These can let a PostScript language printer and AppleWriter produce some absolutely stunning graphic images Unlike all of the far more expensive routes to perspective drawing my routines will automat ically handle any true perspective lettering of any style in any font along with precise perspective circles drawapple draws a street legal apple Enter with the currentpoint set and apple size on stack apple1 Symbol findfont 1 0 0 1 0 0 makefont setfont def apple1 Symbol findfont 1 0 0 1 0 0 makefont setfont def drawapple gsave 1 32 mul dup scale gsave 0 04 setlinewidth 1 setlinecap currentpoint 28 add translate 0 0 moveto 0 05 05 12 10 16 rcurveto stroke grestore currentpoint 36 36 rmoveto 72 0 rlineto 0 665 rlineto 18 0 rlineto 18 06 rlineto 18 06 rlineto 18 O rlineto closepath clip 0 35 sub exch 41 sub exch moveto apple1 360 show currentpoint exch 0 03 add exch moveto apple1 360 show grestore def demo remove before use Fig 6 PostScript code for a street legal apple nS J 38 4 moveto 0 99 setgray 470 drawapple 0 setgray 475 175 moveto
229. hesizer 19 27 Font Manager 28 List Manager Memory manager Misc Tools QuickDraw II Desk Manager Event Manager Scheduler 00 NI gt or oo po Sound Manager Desktop Bus SL_ISISISISTSIS SANE Toolset Integer Math Text Tools Window Mgr Menu Manager Control Manager System Loader Quickdraw Aux Print Manager Line Edit Dialog Manager Scrap Manager ST ISISISIS SSS Standard Files Note Synthesizer Font Manager NIST IST ISISISISISISISTSISTS List Manager Fig 1 Apple Ilgs toolbox interdependencies 39 1 PostScript border builder IIgs toolset dependencies Getting started with APW Transparent laser printing Stock market price records for a long time over a very slow fire Indian style Yes a post show tinaja quest or two could be arranged Call me for more info on this Apple has a new video out You can borrow a free copy from your local user group if you do faithfully promise to never ever return it Unlike most of Apple s previously outstanding videos this one is right down there with They Saved Hitler s Brain and Godzilla versus the Night Nurses The high point here is where you stare at a sign that says New En
230. ick enough and stable enough Ex treme caution is required here Polyester does cost more but it has excellent dimensional stability It will safely withstand the fusion roller temperatures even when it isn t pro perly supported Thus the polyester films will almost always be your far better choice A few sources Those James River people now have free sample packets 39 5 of their new ProTech polyester over head transparency material available for you Xerox has the same stuff at insane prices but this is sometimes offered as a loss leader by Quill That great Paper Plus chain of discount paper stores also has a wide variety of transparent laser materials available Be sure to check them out Dick Blick does carry both clear acetate and polyester in both regular and in self stick styles Be sure to ask for their sign painting and silk screen catalog as well as for their regular art supplies catalog Pretty near any old blueprint or drafting materials supply house will stock polyester in both regular and self stick but not at reasonable prices Stanpat is one major brand name some others advertise in the Design News and the Plan and Print trade journals Finally there s a converter house called Catalina Plastics Inc that will custom cut you most any size and thickness of most any plastic with or without permanent or removable self stick adhesive at very low prices provided you are interes
231. id contests Just show me any way at all to use a canned pagemaking or illustration applications package to do what fol lows that is even remotely as fast and as convenient as using raw PostScript and AppleWriter on a IIe and you ll win an Incredible Secret Money Ma chine In addition the best entry of all will win an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two Back to the program Our goal here is to quickly and conveniently publish a directory for a club or a medium sized organization of 100 to 1200 members The directory is to be a folded booklet and all the directory entries are to be in an open form that is easy to use and easy to read It should also be possible to chop up a directory and use it as quick response mailing labels The directory must accept input from any word processor or data base in the world and all directory entries should fully support some hidden and non printing information such as their membership class when they joined their membership numbers etc The directory should also be able to internally self address and self mail to its own list doing so at the full wide open printer speed Above all the directory has to be smart enough that it will automatic ally put say page eight to the left of page one on the same landscape sheet and automatically put the right names in the right order on each and every page As names get added or removed anywhere in the list all the
232. idual application or else persistently down loaded when you first apply your power Typically you will need your gonzo justify a template and a text file Your template will hold your page and column building routines as well as the font and style selections for your final copy A single colcheck command is used to link your gonzo justify routines back to your page or column making template For long blocks of text there is a scanner built into the gonzo justify routines This is activated through a startgonzo or an esc g and can be exited at any point with an esc x An ending showpage will often be needed after escaping or you might miss the last page Macros are currently defined as esc a through esc f These can do any PostScript function at all There 44 6 is also a supermacro command For instance the amacro z3C string macro def command will switch you to a center justified lowered and bold text with no paragraph indents all on an esc a The supermacro strings will work with anything already defined in the gonzolink dictionary They may also be intermixed with the ordinary Post Script commands but only gonzolink stuff is allowed inside the string If you just route plenty of text in without any template a default page breaking text dumper will take over This is handy for first proofs Alternately you can now instantly position short messages by using a xpos ypos This
233. ies But it will slowly and stunningly create an incredibly realistic Arizona high desert land scape Complete with all the mesas buttes cattle tanks dry washes and canyons Even the block faulting and the bajadas of the basin and range geological province The effect is greatly enhanced when viewed along with some new age music and a suitable selection of choice herbal cupcakes Out here they are available just about everywhere A typical model is the Whispering Sands model AXP 234992 B available through Chris topher Paul at Alpha Centari The physics that s involved gets suprisingly complex When initially turned over bunches of the two sands will drop and create an undulating foreground After a while a nearly complete but crucially imperfect row of air bubbles will form supporting almost all of the remaining sand All the individual bubbles then modulate the falling sand into extremely fine and slowly moving streams creating all the random mesas and buttes The only thing wrong with the beast is that there is no simple way to save an image once it is created So what I would like to do is find some way to use AppleWriter to do the same thing Possibly helped along by making full use of PostScript So for this month s first contest just show me any old way at all to computer model what is going on here If you can work AppleWriter in then so much the better There ll be an Incredible Secret Money Ma
234. ies are also available on Compuserve as well as through all the various software packages offered by leading brokers But far and away my most useful sources of stock price histories are those super cheap ultra scungy and downright obscure Quote NY Quote American and Quote OTC These are available from Harry Lankford for around 7 or so each About the only complaint I have on Quote OTC is that it never picked SUIT 2 maindeltax 0 37 def maindeltay 0 37 def auxdeltax 0 def auxdeltay 0 def cornerdeltax 0 11 def cornerdeltay 0 11 def breductionfactor 0 84 def 0 setlinewidth showpage yyy gg 0000 requires border machine of figure three mainbproc gsave translate 0 37 dup scale 0 0 moveto 1 3 13 0 0 curveto stroke grestore def auxbproc gsave translate 0 37 dup scale 0 5 0 moveto 0 3 0 6 0 7 0 6 1 0 rcurveto stroke grestore def cornerbproc gsave translate 0 37 dup scale 0 0 8 moveto 0 4 0 15 0 1 0 6 0 0 8 rcurveto 3 8 1 8 1 8 3 8 0 0 rcurveto 0 2 0 1 0 65 0 4 0 8 O rcurveto stroke grestore def 50 400 500 400 70 drawsymmetricborder Fig 5 Scroll border for certificates and awards 7 NOODDDD000000000000000000000 Z OONOOUQ0000000000000000 up on Adobe stock As we ve seen in previous columns nearly any idiot could have quintupled his money on this in the last two years while a knowledgeable and admittedly very lucky investor could have gotten a 3000
235. ifying yourself to buy a quart of milk Any submission would be quickly scanned for legality read ability and sanity A small format ting fee would then be paid Presto You are in print Forever No more publisher s committees sitting on your manuscript for four teen months and then rejecting it because it was not timely First review copies could now be available within minutes Or even less if the reviewers have their own machines Many pieces of book publishing on demand are rapidly falling in place I am actually profitably doing a lot of this on my own albeit on a manual rather than an automated basis All gets done low end with outstanding economics And those helpline calls have created a network of associates that also have a very heavy interest in this exciting new opportunity Write or call if you want to join the team or get in on the network No charge and no obligation of course What is GOCCO Every month I feel I just have to be getting to the bottom of the barrel of unique new LaserWriter and Post Script materials and opportunities And every month at the last possible instant along comes some old pro duct scunging away somewhere on a forgotten dusty shelf that one more time opens up great heaping gobs of incredibly mind blowing new desk top and laser printing worlds This month the product is called GOCCO This system will let you instantly convert any laser printed image into a silk scr
236. ig advantage of the C language is that it links beautifully to custom machine language code The foremost source for most IIgs programming books and software are the A P D A people They offer a pro gramming system called APW and short for Apple Programming Work shop This is a series of shells as semblers linkers debuggers and as sorted goodies that give you a total IIgs programming environment We will be seeing lots more on APW in future columns Two other essential books for IIgs programming include the Hgs Firmware Reference Manual and the Apple IIgs Toolbox Reference What are the IIgs Operating Modes One of the real surprises when you try to list a IIgs file or program is that you might get some very strange garbage instead Other times you might get a listing that is correct for a while and then suddenly gets trashed What is going on here First note that many on disk IIgs files are special self relocating load files of system types B3 or B5 The difference is that the B3 files will usually stand alone while the B5 types are intended to run under a shell program of some sort Full details on both of these file types appear in the Apple IIgs Program mer s Workshop Manual Second and even more fundam ental there are several new operating modes that are involved in the IIgs Figure two summarizes these There is a native mode in which the 65816 acts as a full blown 16 bit microprocessor an
237. ighties There sure is a lot of interest these days in LAN s or local area net works Many of these are poorly performing insanely expensive or grossly limiting in one way or an other But one LAN is clearly head and shoulders above all of the others So much so that I like to call it the LAN of the eighties The LAN of the eighties is a simple token ring loop It requires only one single wire between stations That wire need not be shielded or twisted pair and even bare wire has been used in several of the tens of thous ands of world wide installations The LAN loop can be ten or more miles long While only a few dozen servers is the norm many hundreds can be installed In turn each server node normally is able to handle as many as several hundred users With the LAN of the eighties each node uses a unique i d in a collision avoidance token passing protocol The node first checks to see if other traffic is present If not its very own uniquely coded packet will get trans mitted Each packet is then repeated several times to get the best possible error detection and correction Each LAN node is also sophis ticated enough that it continuously va filename character strings BYTE 00 for a subdirectory BYTE 10 low byte first BYTE 1E The ProDOS catalog entries begin on block 02 and continue from there The simplest way to locate successive catalog entries is by their ASCII holds th
238. ill be My prediction here is that the shutter will have its own set of rather unique problems Time will tell Meanwhile watch out for the hype from others Several reviewers have recently been unfairly comparing the other new laser printers against non upgraded and slow old LaserWriters that still use those obsolete version 38 firmware ROMs So before you believe any of all the hype and certainly before you buy any laser printer here are some essential guidelines 1 Make absol utely certain the machine and all its electronics has been designed from the ground up to internally speak PostScript as its native language 2 Get sample printouts of both 6 and 600 point text 3 Do check out the filling in of large black areas 4 Perform tests of your actual required output on the target machine 5 Make certain that a third party toner refilling process is available to keep your toner costs under 0 7 cents per New LaserWriters Postscript point grid Printing onto aluminum Understanding IIgs modes IIgs programming resources page and 6 Run some of the 200 free downloads on the machine you can get off our free PostScript BBS at 409 244 4704 If you do not already have access to a PostScript speaking printer the best way to get started on all this is with Adobe s PostScript Cookbook and with my own An Introduction to PostScript video The latter also will show you how to do cartridge refills and will pay for itse
239. ill by the end user Show Me Some Print Shop Resources All those of you that are already following my Hardware Hacker col umn over in Radio Electronics are painfully aware that I am a great fan of trade journals I personally sub scribe to nearly 500 of these Trade journals are the controlled circulation insider magazines that do let you zero in on products and secrets of most any field of endevor You normally get a free subscrip tion to a trade journal by filling out a qualification card that will tell them what they want to hear It is also possible to gain a free subscription just by asking for an advertising rate card and requesting a sample copy Additional ploys are included in my Incredible Secret Money Machine The reference shelf at your local library should hold both Uhiricht s Periodicals Dictionary and that International Standard Periodicals Dictionary Together they list some 45 000 or so trade journals and other magazines available today Of these two I prefer Uhlricht s At any rate if you are going to get at all serious about desktop publish ing sooner or later you ll be won dering what the big boys are up to Figure three lists some traditional print shop and printing resources that you might find of more than passing interest While most of these are free trade journals a few supply houses product catalogs trade associations and fee based mags are included Many thanks go to John Henry
240. image buildup through its device independence its outstanding curve drawing abilities its powerful techniques for trans lation rotation scaling and for other transformations and for its extensive font machinery Unlike several lower level printer languages a single PostScript font can be shown in any size from 2 points to 60 000 points in quarter point increments and shown in any direction on the page or along a circular or even totally arbitrary path Powerful post path techniques also give you a virtually infinite number of variations upon any of the many thousands of PostScript fonts that are available today To use PostScript your printer or output device must have a built in PostScript interpreter As a user you can crete your PostScript programs using nothing but words and numbers in any old word processor Or you can use any of dozens of popular PostScript speaking canned applic ations programs Or any of a number of powerful emulators that temp orarily downgrade PostScript so as to get it to behave like older printer and plotter languages Because of its nearly total device independence PostScript will work with virtually any computer although many of the more powerful canned applications programs tend to be mostly Mac and IBM oriented On the other hand I have yet to find any program on any computer that is remotely as good as AppleWriter on a Ile when it comes to quickly and conveniently developing custo
241. ime Which means it passes a Cray 1 like it was sitting up on blocks Apple has finally addressed the disk drive blowup problems on the IIgs If you ever do experience any difficulties with both drives coming on at once or have similar hangups see your dealer for a free change of your disk drive internal I O board Let s see Apple now has two new videos out a user group one on Woz talking about me and one on desktop publishing and communication solu tions There is also a new Desktop Solutions portfolio that goes with the second video See your user group for more details Two publications included here are the fat Apple Desktop Communica tions Solutions Reference Guide and their DeskTopics newsletter Be sure to check these out As usual you can get a list of all of your local user groups by calling 800 538 9696 Extension 500 The PostScript bulletin board that was previously at 409 244 4704 is going through some reorganization difficulties It should shortly reopen in a major city with a new number a larger hard disk multiple lines and both Telenet and Tymenet access While you are waiting you might want to check out a brand new Post Script board at 707 882 2390 U S Patent 4740443 shows you how to implant carbide teeth onto your toner particles so you can now scratch and grind up all of your laser printer cartridge drums Guess which company it was issued to For this month s lukewarm stock tip
242. ing the mechanism Reduced but not eliminated in v47 6 Diablo emulation has nasty page creep This is eliminated on v47 Other more subtle Diablo problems remain 7 Multiple copies cannot be aborted on a toner or paper problem Fixed for tray feeding on v47 A lesser manual feed problem remains 8 An obscure seam problem was cured by slightly shifting the halftone masks on v47 Some high quality gray grids created on Version 38 may not image right on v47 Call me for the fix 9 The stringwidth command took a ludicrously long 12 milliseconds to execute Shortened to a still inexcusable 2 milliseconds in v47 10 The font protection in pathforall could easily be defeated by a double clip Unfortunately and stupidly this was corrected in v47 11 Slight glitches are present in some enormous Palatino font characters This is not yet fixed in v47 12 The miter machinery operates in a slightly different manner in v47 Some of the v38 code may not miter in exactly the same way Fig 1 Bugs in LaserWriter ROM Version 38 J 33 1 ASK THE GURU to be shot out of the saddle with a new dual mode machine that is able to send either PostScript or standard fax The new machine might handle 2540 DPI compared to the crude 216 DPI of the fax standard Stay tuned for more details Turning to shoptalk I have moved my Hardware Hacker column over to Radio Electronics magazine and do hope to see you over there Emphasis th
243. integrity and is trivially easy to cheaply bypass Meanwhile DAT champion Sony put their money where their mouth was and bought CBS records out right In the process they told all the anti DATs left over at CBS to sit down and shut up Naturally all the anti DATs have vowed to continue cutting off their nose to spite their face After all look at how those VCR s completely stopped the entire movie industry dead in its tracks Uh huh Apple IIgs sales have been going through the roof and breaking all sorts of records Apple has responded to this deplorable and despicable situation in the predictable manner by slashing the price of the Mac so it now lists for less than that of a loaded IIgs system Recently a secret survey revealed that Apple had erred by a factor of four on their estimate of the average age of a IIgs buyer Their planned free skateboard with each IIgs pur chased promo has been cancelled Unfortunately the thinking behind it does still remain in place Bubble gum cards anyone Actually you might expect across the board price cuts this summer on the IIgs and most everything Apple The Apple suggested list prices are totally meaningless anyway so long as you do shop around for a reasonable dealer You will get the worst prices from the larger yuppie a DB19 male connector from last IIGS 3 5 inch dri
244. inting News 1350 S Monterey Pass Road 401 North Broad Street 468 Park Avenue South Monterey Park CA 91754 Philadelphia PA 19108 New York City NY 10016 213 264 2000 215 238 5300 212 689 9690 Federal Graphics Instant Printer Publishing Technology 120 Willow Stret Box 368 401 North Broad Street North Andover MA 01845 Northbrook IL 60062 Philadelphia PA 19108 508 681 8578 312 564 5940 215 238 5300 Font amp Function Modern Office Technology Quick Printing PO Box 7900 1100 Superior Avenue 1680 SW Bayshore Blvd Mountain View CA 94039 Cleveland OH 44114 Port St Lucie FL 34984 800 833 6687 216 696 7000 407 879 6666 Form NAPL Screen Printing 433 East Monroe Avenue 780 Palisade Avenue 407 Gilbert Avenue Alexandria VA 22301 Teaneck NJ 07666 Cincinatti OH 45202 703 836 6232 201 342 0700 513 421 2050 Forms Professional Office Systems Southern Graphics 401 North Broad Street 941 Danbury Road 410 Verona Street Philadelphia PA 19108 Georgetown CT 06829 Kissimmee FL 32742 215 238 5300 203 544 9526 305 846 2880 Graphic Arts Abstracts Package Printing Systemdict 4615 Forbes Avenue 401 North Broad Street PO Box 7900 Pittsburgh PA 15213 Philadelphia PA 19108 Mountain View CA 94039 412 621 6941 215 238 5300 800 833 6687 Graphic Art Lit Abstracts Paper Film amp Foil Converter Target Marketing One Lomb Memorial Drive 29 North Wacker Drive 401 North Broad Street Rochester NY 14623 Chicago IL 60606 Philadelphia PA
245. ion 47 LaserWriter upgrade kits These speed you up by one third and will eliminate some bad habits At a suggested list of 320 they are defin itely cost effective if you are using your machine two hours per day There is a new and free Apple user group publication that s called Tech Tidbits But the issues I have seen to date are so full of errors omissions and outright misinformation that they could only be a secret IBM plant Their most heineous crimes so far lie in perpetuating the outright myths that AppleTalk is needed to drive the va S IWEM begins with a series of comments and a revision history A test is made to see if the IWEM dictionary is already installed If not and if a valid password a persistent download is begun Otherwise the download is aborted The main emulation code is defined as _WDJ_ When called this begins the emulation for the rest of the job The IWEmdict is defined and begun Countries are defined and a default country is selected Twenty mouse font characters are then defined followed by a grafFont character set The Courier font is then modified to print four extra characters the combined AE in upper and lower case regular and bold International character remapping code is then defined as needed for the various languages The printfile routine is defined as the main job loop This reads and prints characters until a control D end of file Routines are defined for InitVariables Res
246. is wololrafalo a wlrN te Ron Sparks Jim Palmer Phil Martin Wyatt Palmer Don Lancaster Chris Allen Brent Herbert Darrell Jeff Martin lrafan loafpw wlm rlo Walter Re Jesse Smith N Mike Nelson N an Russell Call N N N w N ss N oa Total Response Fig 3 A typical rubbergrid form 33 3 ASK THE GURU Cray 1 as the host More importantly the very same file that drives a 300 DPI laser printer can be instantly upgraded to 2540 DPI phototypeset ting simply by moving one cable You most assuredly do not need either a Macintosh or the Appletalk network to speak PostScript In fact Appletalk just costs you money will severely limit your choice of hard ware and is often very slow PostScript is easily run on any Apple Mac Atari IBM or Commo dore machine by using standard serial communication Often all you will need is your favorite word processor or comm program These speak PostScript beautifully There are two major ways of using PostScript You might either work directly with the language yourself or else go to a canned applications program Working with the language yourself does require some front end learning effort and does demand that you look at the printed page to see the final image But the results you
247. is a one shot promo deal aimed at getting you hooked on CD ROM Good old ProDOS AppleWriter is once again available through the Sun Remarketing folks at a cost of only 29 Several third parties are working on a IIgs upgrade Stay tuned Tom Weishaar s great Open Apple magazine has changed its name to A2 Central They also are now stocking the best of the hard to get Apple software and publications His Open Apple of course has been far and away the very finest Apple publi cation anywhere ever Hewlett Packard seems to be the first one to market with the newest Canon RX duplex laser printer This jewel prints on both sides of the page and is only slightly slower than the usual SX engines as used in both the LaserJet II and LaserWriter II Duplex printing is essential for any book printing on demand and for lots of other production uses It greatly simplified collating and dramatically reduces binding errors Unfortunately that new LaserJet The tearing method SX cartridge refilling Some thick paper ploys PostScript font bitmaps Colorease and Identicolor IID is totally brain dead and does not speak PostScript In my opinion this renders it utterly useless for any ser ious desktop publishing It would be reasonable to expect a duplex Apple LaserWriter using this engine Hopefully coupled with those newer and faster versions of Post Script that have already obsoleted the NTX A Weitek or other RISC engine would als
248. is a test cc format This will center your message onto your selected x and y positions The options here include cl ef and cr for left fill and right justification The rule is to use plain text with the scanner and text delimited with parenthesis for callout commands With left or fill justification the text is automatically broken up by words to fit between a left limit of xpos and a right margin limit set by xpos txtwide There are two center justification and two right justification routines If you call for a center justify by using the esc C command then justification will take place between a left margin of xpos and a right margin set by xpos txtwide just like the usual left and fill justify This is handy for centered headers If you call for a center justify by using xpos ypos string cc then each line will end up centered on xpos and txtwide will get ignored This is useful for all of your ad copy headlines or anywhere else that you simply want to center on a position independent of any column widths Similarly an ese R will print flush right up against xpos txtwide with no text ever to the left of xpos And an xpos ypos string ce will simply align flush right against xpos The right blurb on the Ask The Guru header does this How does it work There are four steps to gonzo text justification These include prepar ation length analysis justification calculations and finally imaging justi
249. ive method is to use thick paper I found this very high bulk and quite white paper called biology filler over in the bookstore And that was the key secret to running away with all the marbles Nobody ever caught on Seriously the paper thickness can va vertical scanmap returns this scan list to the host 0 805005 which is easily edited into Rscanmap 0805005 1 805 Using the utilities of figure three here is how to convert a PostScript font Palatino R into a Palatino Bold findfont 30 0 0 30 0 0 makefont setfont mapproc 100 100 translate 1 dup scale def imageproc newpath 2 2 moveto R reportvlinemap def xshift 431 def yshift 425 def 30 20 imageproc vlinemap 1 805105 05205 3 80 320 Di 65 7 9 6 6 1Or Sie 7 6879 68 0 85 12 0 85 13 0 85 1 0 85 16 0 85 ES 0 85 19 0 85 20 85 21 0 85 22 0 85 2 0 85 25 0 85 27 0 85 28 78 7 28 0 8 29 78 7 29 0 6 30 6 31 78 7 3 8 7 32 42 3 32 0 5 33 78 7 33 41 4 33 05 4 39 6 34 9 6 357 37 9 35 10 5 36 78 7 36 36 10 36 0 5 37 4 12 28 7 38 33 13 39 78 7 3 9 31 15 40 78 7 40 30 16 all 7 42 27 20 43 77 8 43 25 23 44 77 8 44 24 24 45 2 2 21 28 47 75 10 47 19 31 48 74 11 48 17 34 49 73 375 14 40 51 70 15 51 13 43 52 65 20 52 45 16 52 11 40 53 39 54 8 33 55 46 38 55 7 32 56 47 37 56 5 33 7 4 32 33 8 948 3525 97 4 7 32 60 49 34 60 0 32 61 50 62 51 3 51 30 63 0 27 64 52 28 64 0 26 65 53 27 65 5 24 66 0 67 0 21 68 58 18 68 0 20
250. ix 0 def cfix 0 def endtheline def justR sfix 0 def cfix 0 def swallowandhang gsave sparechange 0 translate endtheline grestore def justC sfix 0 def cfix 0 def swallowandhang gsave sparechange 2 div 0 translate endtheline grestore def changefont dup fontn 4 get ne fontn exch 4 exch put fontn cvx exec spacewidth stringwidth pop spacestretch add charstretch add def pop ifelse def changejust dup justx 4 get ne justx exch 4 exch put pop ifelse def escapeproc pop linestring 1 index sparechange exch def 2 index 1 add dup 1 sub oktohere exch def get cmnd exch def createss ssok false def cmnd dup 0 cmnd put cvn gonzolink exch get exec exch 1 add dup 1 add ssstart exch def oktohere ssstart def exch exit def otherproc dup 033 eq escapeproc if dup n eq pop dup sparechange exch def 1 index oktohere exch def createss justx cvx exec exit pop exit ifelse loop def spaceproc spaces spaces 1 add def pop dup sparechange exch def 1 index oktohere exch def ssok true def spacewidth sub dup 0 It createss justx cvx exec dup sparechange exch def 1 index 1 add oktohere exch def ifelse def commandscan dup eq spaceproc otherproc ifelse def fontn font def during scan the running line sum is on the stack above the running character counter firstuseflag true def removes PostScript stringsave bug gonzojustify firstuseflag fontn 4 50 put 49 changefont firstusefla
251. l macros that can simplify making a toolbox call But you still will have to carefully set up the stack before making this call following the rules for that tool What gets real messy fast is that some tools need other tools already present or they will not work These are called toolbox interdependencies and many of them are listed in figure one Before a tool or toolbox can be used all of the precursor tools must already be in place and ready to use Thus you have to be very careful about when and how you select a tool or a toobox or some highly ungood things will happen Very interestingly tool 14 requires tool 16 to be installed first And you guessed it tool 16 requires tool requires border machine of figure three mainbproc gsave translate 500 0 moveto 0 setlinecap 0 533 setlinewidth 0 setgray 1 0 rlineto stroke grestore def auxbproc gsave translate 0 5 dup moveto 1 0 rlineto O 1 rlineto 1 0 rlineto closepath gsave 0 99 setgray fill grestore 0 1 setlinewidth stroke grestore def cornerbproc gsave translate 0 5 0 5 moveto 1 2 0 rlineto 0 1 2 rlineto Fig W RRA SR Sat 9 setgray fill grestore 0 1 setlinewidth stroke grestore def auxdeltax 1 def auxdeltay 1 def Jenniina fh E AAt ASK THE GURU 14 to be installed first The rule is this The window 14 control 16 and menu manager 15 should be considered as one unit and should be started in the order just shown
252. ld paddles or joysticks add a 16 pin machined pin contact DIP socket to the pins This can then safely be plugged into the motherboard Now when not if the pins bend or break off all you have to do is snap on another DIP socket rather than taking the paddle or joystick apart and try ing to fix it Another tip If you are reading a pair of paddles or a joystick from machine language be sure to wait several milliseconds between your successive paddle or joystick reads otherwise you can get some strange interaction between the two paddles or the joystick X and Y axes Tell Me about Hot Stamping Our never ending quest for wierder and more bizarrely wonderous neat stuff goodies for laser printers has finally led us around to hot stamping While you can use Omnicolor or Kroy Kolor to fake a hot stamping the real thing is far more durable and far more impressive Hot stamped foil consists of a thin and brightly colored film or foil to which a thin layer of high temper ature adhesive has been attached You press a stick of type or else a steel or silicon rubber die against the foil and quickly heat it The heat and pressure then transfers the foil to the paper or other substrate The cost is around a dime a square foot Obvious uses do include business cards book covers announcements ad displays and greeting cards Or anywhere else you want to impart a high quality image Hot stamping is sometimes com bined
253. le by way of Thompson and Thompson There are lots of other suppliers so call me if you want to know more about any of them There are two stages to the toner refilling You first have to modify the cartridge once After modifying you can easily refill as many times as the drum condition lets you Figures three and four show you how to prepare your CX cartridge for reloading You first melt a 1 4 inch hole in the spent toner holding tank as shown by using a small soldering iron Then you melt a 1 2 inch hole in the fresh toner supply tank The fresh tank is reached by snapping the large cardboard label off from the ends A very aggressive tape is then used to seal these holes The metallized tape sometimes used for write protect tabs works fine It is super important to get a permanant seal for any toner dumped wholesale into your printer can cause permanant damage To refill your modified cartridge remove the bottom tape and dump the spent toner out Do this outside pre ferably in a slight breeze Tap the notches along the tank as you do this to release any caked toner Re seal this hole after emptying Next remove the fresh supply tank filling hole and use a plastic funnel to dump a bottle of toner into the supply tank Seal this hole Add a label to your cartridge that keeps track of its history Be sure to use the little green tool to clean the corona wire in the cartridge Then run off fifty copies to make sure
254. le mul exactyscale exch def this adjusts the yscale for an main more exacter fit bordheight cornerdeltay cornerdeltax add maindeltay numy 1 add mul add auxdeltay numy mul add exactyscale mul div exactyscale mul exactyscale exch def do the mainproc and auxproc all the way around gsave bordleft cornerdeltax maindeltax 2 div add exactxscale mul add bordtop translate gsave numx 1 add 0 0 gsave exactxscale exactyscale scale mainbproc grestore maindeltax auxdeltax add exactxscale mul 0 translate repeat grestore maindeltax 2 div auxdeltax 2 div add exactxscale mul 0 translate gsave numx 0 0 gsave exactxscale exactyscale scale auxbproc grestore maindeltax auxdeltax add exactxscale mul 0 translate repeat grestore grestore top gsave bordleft bordwidth add bordtop cornerdeltay maindeltay 2 div add exactyscale mul sub translate gsave numy 1 add 0 0 gsave exactyscale exactxscale scale 90 rotate mainbproc grestore 0 maindeltay auxdeltay add exactyscale mul neg translate repeat grestore 0 maindeltay 2 div auxdeltay 2 div add neg exactyscale mul translate gsave numy 0 0 gsave exactyscale exactxscale scale 90 rotate auxbproc grestore 0 maindeltay auxdeltay add exactyscale mul neg translate repeat grestore grestore right gsave bordleft cornerdeltax maindeltax 2 div add exactxscale mul add bordtop bordheight sub translate gsave numx 1 add 0 0 gsave exactxscale exactyscale scale 180 rotate mainbproc grestore maindeltax auxdeltax add exactxsca
255. le mul 0 translate repeat grestore maindeltax 2 div auxdeltax 2 div add exactxscale mul 0 translate gsave numx 0 0 gsave exactxscale exactyscale scale 180 rotate auxbproc grestore maindeltax auxdeltax add exactxscale mul 0 translate repeat grestore grestore bottom gsave bordleft bordtop cornerdeltay maindeltay 2 div add exactyscale mul sub translate gsave numy 1 add 0 0 gsave exactyscale exactxscale scale 90 rotate mainbproc grestore 0 maindeltay auxdeltay add exactyscale mul neg translate repeat grestore 0 maindeltay 2 div auxdeltay 2 div add neg exactyscale mul translate gsave numy 0 0 gsave exactyscale exactxscale scale 90 rotate auxbproc grestore 0 maindeltay auxdeltay add exactyscale mul neg translate repeat grestore grestore left and the corners all go on last gsave bordleft bordtop translate exactxscale exactyscale scale 0 0 cornerbproc grestore upper left gsave bordleft bordwidth add bordtop translate exactxscale exactyscale scale 90 rotate 0 0 cornerbproc grestore upper right gsave bordleft bordwidth add bordtop bordheight sub translate exactxscale exactyscale scale 180 rotate 0 0 cornerbproc grestore lower right gsave bordleft bordtop bordheight sub translate exactxscale exactyscale scale 90 rotate 0 0 cornerbproc grestore lower left report squashticity to host The current squashticity factor is print exactyscale exactxscale div flush def Fig 3 The bountifully bodacious better border buil
256. le so long that the transmission time significantly exceeds the execution time Fig 3 PostScript runtime speedup secrets N 52 3 that great but they are definitely better than some Die cutting on a laser printer Why not We ll have a complete roundup on this interesting topic someday For here and now though check out the Die O Perf people who sell all sorts of pre cut blanks that are suitable for laser printing Two of my favorites are shown to you in figure two The unique return postcard mailers are prescored for a triple fold and pre perforated for a return card And the coupon mailers outstanding for any local business promos do include eight tear off coupons The cost is around a nickle each in smaller quantities How About That Blinding PostScript Speedup As all you regular readers know I am very big on PostScript book on demand printing where individual book copies are produced on a when and as needed basis I am currently doing this on three current volumes including Ask The Guru I Ask the Guru IT and Hardware Hacker II and do have a dozen more books in the works that will be soon produced this way Naturally I ll be happy to send you autographed samples of these at the going rate At least for me the new book on demand concept works and works well Profitably Here and now For self collating book on demand publishing to really be cost effective you 1 have to reduce yo
257. lectronics name from Ziff Davis and now fully intends to aggressively revive both the intent and spirit of the original magazine Carl and Jerry might even return I suspect I might eventually end up involved with this The SPCA is after me over that scrawny and underfed wolf family that s trying to eek out a marginal subsistence on my doorstep Those pups sure are looking rather pitiful Scurvy and all So now s a good time to remind you about our Ask The Guru volume I and II along with the Hardware Hacker II books For those of you into PostScript we do have my Post Script Show and Tell the Intro to PostScript video and the PostScript Work in Progress disks And we now do stock all of the usual Apple and Adobe books on PostScript At the very least send along some Purina Wolf Chow and some Vitamin C The real biggie this month does involve retreiving the actual bitmaps and or scanmaps of any previously imaged PostScript fonts But first What is the Tearing Method It is an astonishingly fast and very simple way of taking apart and then analyzing virtually any machine lan guage or assembly language code While full details do appear in my Enhancing your Apple volume I PI give you a quick summary here The keys to the tearing method are to use page hilighters to color code a printed listing and letting that listing self reveal its structure purpose and function Most of the method can be done by rote
258. lf three times over on your first refill I have both of these in stock here along with lots of other PostScript goodies Oh the utter shame and horror of it all Apple has stupidly dropped AppleWriter from their developer price lists Why this is so is a real mystery since AppleWriter is still the only genuinely useful word pro cessor that is currently available for the IIgs besides being an outstanding desktop publishing choice Yes I will admit that there are new IIgs word processors that can freely intermix totally illegible mauve and fuscia text on an orange background But all of these new programs are so stupendously slow that they re only useful when you are writing a term paper on glaciers snail geriatrics or political reform Besides of course lacking those powerful self prompting glossaries Apple Assembly Cookbook Lancaster Apple Assembly Lines S C Apple Ilgs Firmware Reference APDA Apple Ilgs Hardware Reference APDA Apple Ilgs ProDOS 16 Reference APDA Apple Ilgs Toolbox References and II APDA Apple Programmer s Workshop APDA Apple Programmer s Workshop Reference APDA EDASM Assembler Tools APDA Exploring the Apple Ilgs Little Micro Cookbooks and II Lancaster ORCA M Assembler Byte Works Programmers Introduction to the Apple Ilgs APDA Programming the 65816 Eyes and Litchey S C Assembler S C Fig 1 Some Apple Ilgs programming resources N 36 1
259. ll About Copy Fitting Both the form and the content of any page layout can be equally im portant Copy fitting is the arcane art of getting your entire layout to come out even so it will exactly fit all the space provided You are worst off when you are fitting poetry biblical quotations or anything else that absolutely has to be word for word accurate You are best off when you re doing your own layout of your own text In general though most average text can be ad justed by adding or removing a few words without hurting the content On a five page column layout like this one at worst you could end up with a ten percent shortfall or excess And the typical will be more like five percent And that is only one word in twenty No big deal We have already seen how post justification editing can be used on a micro scale to give the most ascetic text lines Pretty much the same ideas can be used on a macro scale to fit the entire text to the available space Text can obviously be made more or less wordy to fit More often than not there will be some rather minor or even redundant stuff that can be dropped while actually sharpening the on page message Or there will be some important point that might be further amplified or detailed So the very first step is usually to stretch or shrink the text as best you can trying to sharpen your message while not hurting the content style or above all the author s intent B
260. ll does require two or three seconds to make up a complete page But this can be the same two or three seconds of the feeding time available during a normal print cycle So you can get a virtually zero page make up time for many typical pages And those that are not typical can still be printed surprisingly fast I ve summarized some of the key speedup secrets in figure three The first five tricks might apply to any PostScript file at any time on any machine The rest of the list applies specifically to pages or files that you know you will want to be reprinting a number of times in the future The centermost secret is to get all your communications under control Most communications on most com puters take place far slower than you think they do owing to the vastly ex cessive onion effect of layer upon layer of controlling software The key rule here is to think two tin cans and a string for your comm channel Anything else will slow you down and will severely penalize you when you are doing book on demand publishing Remember that it all has to get inside the printer before most of it can be used If you can afford one the add on SCSI hard drive for the NTX should give you the fastest possible comm times What you do is download all of your files onto the hard disk and then transfer them as needed with a suitable supervisor routine I have yet to do this though and I do suspect things won t end up quite as fast a
261. ll the earlier LaserWriters This effectively locks out the NTX from virtually all pro duction uses and has forced me to drop back to using my 400 000 copy LaserWriter Plus for my book on demand production printing How does this 15 1 cost penalty come about On the LaserWriter Plus you can buy used cartridges for as low as 5 and then refill them up to seven times with third party toner for as little as 7 50 per shot This can give you per page toner costs in the 0 33 cents per page range And yes those images are nearly as black when you do use a good third party toner source The cartridges get up to their blackest after their second or third toner refill On the LaserWriter NTX it is hard to find any cartridges under 115 and they usually will scratch before you can even refill them once This gives you a nickel per page or higher toner cost and the resultant 15 1 penalty Interestingly if you immediately remove that highly abrasive Canon factory toner from a new cartridge and refill it with a good third party toner then you can get several refills Give the factory toner to your neigh borhood diesel mechanic for use as valve grinding compound If the NTX if to survive at all the factory cartridges simply must get 47 3 lowered in price must be made far more scratch resistant must intern ally provide non abrasive toner and absolutely positively and emphati cally must be made easier to ref
262. llers have been asking for ways to run PostScript on the low end dot matrix printers Well to do so would be the equivalent of putting a new 0332Porsche 0331 engine onto a skateboard Nonetheless the 0332LaserGo 0331 people are the first ones out with such a product Right now it is mainly for 0334IBM 0331 use but Apple versions are cer tain to follow 0332Apple Computer 0331 does have a few special interest publications that you might want to be aware of For you developers there is the 0332Viewpoints 0331 newsletter and the 0332Outside Apple 0331 magazine For all of you bureaucrats check into 0332Innovations 0331 For librarians there is the 0332Apple Library User s Group 0331 and among the many educational pub lications 0332Wheels for the Mind 0331 is just about the best Meanwhile 0332Adobe Systems 0331 has a free 0332Font and Function 0331 typography catalog out that includes useful design and layout ideas Turning to my own products besides the 0332Ask the Guru 0331 reprints we now also have the 0332Hardware Hacker 0331 reprints from the sister column to this one over in 0332Radio Electronics 0331 There s a new disk for the gonzo justify stuff we ll feature here and as usual our 0332PostScript Show and Tell 0331 available for most computers The gonzo biggie this month is just that 261 the gonzo justify have been working on for several years now But first 033c What is in the new
263. llgs v3 2 System Master Disk 033d Well let s see First it boots faster and is better organized and literally hundreds of bugs have newly been corrected Or at least changed ProDOS 033416 0331 can now boot over AppleTalk and the bugs in handling very large and single byte files have been corrected Random memory trashing has also been fixed along with an easing of all the O334SCSI 0331 format problems The printer drivers have been im proved somewhat in a too little and too late manner The 0332ImageWriter 0331 driver is now faster on images and supports vertical condensed printing A new and totally useless 0332ImageWriter LQ 0331 driver will recognize the machine but not support any of its features While there are substantial new improvements in the LaserWriter drivers for applications willing to play Apple games in Apple s way a plain old 0332Send PS 0331 is still conspicuously absent You can however still rearrange 0334IWEM 0331 to make it into an acceptable no nonsense PostScript driver 033x showpage Fig 6 Gonzo justify text example A minimum kerning that is set by charstretch and spacestreitch is in cluded in each width calculation The width addition continues until such time as a the next word will no longer fit on the line or b you do change the font or c you force a linefeed or d you embed an escape command that does something fancy The end product of the analysis i
264. lopes better and offers more solid blacks You also get slightly more memory and modestly faster speed The high range machine is named the LaserWriter II NTX This adds more memory a faster 68020 main processor and a LaserJet emulator to the NT The main benefits are faster operation and more memory to hold more downloaded fonts at once Instead of providing an internal a N This patch is for ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 version AWD SYS The patch allows printing on a Ilgs by defeating any attempts at setting serial data values to a non existant 6551 port chip It works by trashing the i d bytes for the super serial card and by aborting any O J 1 Make a third or higher backup copy of ProDOS Applewriter version 2 0 Plainly label this disk FOR IIGS ONLY 2 Get into BASICS SYS Then CALL 151 to reach the monitor 3 BLOAD AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 TSYS D2 4 Verify 4DBO AO Change 4DBO0 60 5 Verify 4F67 01 Change 4F67 10 6 Verify 4F6E 31 Change 4F6E 13 7 UNLOCK AWD SYS 8 BSAVE AWD SYS A 2000 E 6020 TSYS 9 LOCK AWD SYS Fig 1 Ilgs patch for ProDOS Applewriter 2 0 N J A new high tech toy Perspective transforms New LaserWriter details IIgs AppleWriter patches Toner cartridge reloading hard disk there s a SCSI port that lets you mix and match four external hard disk or CD ROM devices The pricing is enigmatic at the present time The dealer margins are insanely high which either means th
265. lug the holes is with a tapered plastic closure from either Caplugs or Niagara Plastics Fusion roller wiper pads should be replaced each time you reload One source of the custom manufactured peel and stick and silicon pressure lubricated Nomex felt strips is Lazer Products These are normally in cluded free with each bottle of their reload toner A plain old 5 16 inch wood chisel is often the best way to remove the old wiper pad Note that washing and reusing wiper pads is a no no Their purpose is to deliver a very precisely metered amount of silicon fusion oil Improp erly redone wiper pads can rather dramatically shorten the life of the expensive fuser assemblies A good drum lubricant is essential to a proper reload You can get drum lubricant in bulk from those larger copier repair houses while small quantities are available as Pixie Dust once again from Lazer Products Several plastic strips are useful as well A twelve mil thick piece of the clear butyrate plastic is useful as a feeler gauge for regapping cartridges that have heavy streaking problems Similar plastic strips can be used for sealing the fresh toner in reloads that have to be shipped somewhere else or stored for long periods of time Do let me know if there are any favorite reloading tools of yours that I may have missed a note from Yodar Kritch Fig 4 Half of a two up personal notepad 602 428 4073 51 4 Tell Me A
266. ly unlimited font choices including fractional sizes and 7 You can drop down into raw PostScript at any place any time for any reason rearranging all of your scenery to suit yourself There are no WhaddayameanlIcant s ever At any rate a template is the key to using any page layout application gonzo or otherwise A template is simply a set of rules that set the style and the vibes of the document you are going to produce The important values in a template will include the margins the number of columns and their widths all your font selections handling of left versus right pages March 1989 gonzo begin hack II temp 1 begin printerror rightpage true def titlepage true def date March 1989 def pagenum 15 1 def posfig1 figure2Ir def showthegrid false def dropindent 31 def keystonewide 103 def keystonedelta 8 def keystoneshow true def blurb A new disco circuit Zero crossing detection AC power load interface Phase controlled dimming Dialog information services def IIlil BORDERS AND TITLES startpage llill INCLUDED FIGURE STARTS HERE figheight 200 def yfigadj 4 5 yinc mul def title 0337Fig 1 This ac power output interface will let you directly control 100 watt lamps and other high power loads from your microcontroller or your personal computer The special phototriac optocoupler provides safety isolation Note that a low logic input will light the lamp def
267. m or unique PostScript code PostScript today is aimed mostly at laser printers and phototypesetters Software is now becoming available that lets you run PostScript on low end printers for plotters engraving 46 5 machines and even fax systems And it is only a matter of time that display PostScript will become a de facto graphics standard owing both to its device independence and raw power If you think about it for a while it sure seems downright stupid to have one screen graphics standard and a second printer standard As the Mac people have found out the hard way QuickDraw simply cannot hold a candle to display PostScript when it comes to rich and powerful page descriptions So how do you get started using and learning PostScript on your own If you do not already have access to a PostScript speaking printer start with my Intro to PostScript video these Ask the Guru reprints or that blue PostScript Tutorial and Cook book from Adobe Systems Later on when you get your own printer pick up my PostScript Show and Tell disks available for most popular personal computer brands and purchase Adobe s red PostScript Reference Manual and their green PostScript Program Design books I do try to stock all these Or write and call me for more specific suggestions We now get 30 to 50 PostScript helpline questions per day Best calling times are 8 5 weekdays mountain standard time What is This M
268. makefont setfont def ont Symbol findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def xtwide 155 def yinc 10 5 def charstretch 0 2 def spacestretch 0 def maxsstretch 2 5 def maxcstretch 1 def dropcount 3 def dropindent 38 def lastlinestretch 0 4 def pm 0 def ytop 720 200 sub def ypos ytop def ybot 80 def yparendadj 0 def pmnorm 10 def paraindent amacro zy0 stringmacro def start drop cap bmacro iFy1 stringmacro def finish drop cap cmacro zyC3 stringmacro def centered title dmacro pF1 stringmacro def normal text rightpage true def leftmargin rightpage 60 60 ifelse def xpos leftmargin def colspace 170 def colbot 60 def coltop 700 colbot sub yinc div floor yinc mul 0 1 add colbot add def totalcolumns 3 def column 1 def collimits coltop colbot coltop colbot coltop colbot def starttext column 1 def ytop collimits 0 get def ybot collimits 1 get def ypos ytop def xpos leftmargin def justx justL def totalcolumns colcheck repeat firstuseflag true def def header titlepage gsave leftmargin coltop 50 sub translate colcheck def txtwide 1000 def indent 4 def indent 33 O330Hardware Hacker 0331 cl indent 7 date cl indent 62 0332 0331 Don Lancaster s 0332 cl 6 setlinewidth 1 setlinecap 3 23 moveto widthhold 6 sub 0 rlineto gsave stroke grestore nuisance begin 4 5 setlinewidth bestgray lightgray stroke black end boxwide
269. maximum possible speed code similar to this should be included inside your actual justification routines Otherwise speed will be lost if you end up scanning any particular character more than once The stringwidth command in PostScript is extremely slow 6000 string scanstr exch def exitchar 120 def escsubchar 33 def use esc x to exit scanner use escape as is startscan clear more false def 1 1 add dup currentfile read not pop exit if dup 92 eq rslashproc if dup 10 eq pop more true def exit if if you are not substituting escape bypass the next line as acomment dup escsubchar eq pop 27 if dup 27 eq exitproc if scanstr 3 1 roll put loop scanstr exch 0 exch getinterval replace the following line with whatever proc is going to use the newly created PostScript strings myjustproc pop more not exit if loop bind def The rslashproc routine does reverse slash substitutions to the raw input text as if it was a PostScript string Replace with rslashproc def if you do not want to use reverse slash substitutions rslashproc pop currentfile read not pop more false def exit if dup 41 eq 1000 if replicate right paren dup 40 eq 1000 if replicate left paren dup 92 eq 1000 if replicate reverse slash dup 98 eq pop 8 1000 if substitute bs dup 102 eq pop 12 1000 if substitute formfeed dup 116 eq pop 9 1000 if substitute tab dup 110 eq po
270. me all About Your Gonzo Justify Routines For several years now I have been trying to push the limits of 300 DPI LaserWriter desktop publishing We have seen in previous issues how everybody positively insists on using the seventeenth most putrid Laser Writer gray and how that might be cured with a very few keystrokes We have also found out how you can set 44 4 legible type as small as three points through a pixel locking technique We have already seen how pixel line remapping can paint practically any image onto most any surface But the centermost key to nearly everything of course lies in a decent justification routine that is able to attractively place mixed font column lines in order onto a page I have been continuously devel oping and debugging some gonzo justify routines that do what I want the way I want them to So let me tell you what I think is important in a decent justify routine Firstoff I couldn t care less about WYSIWYG At the present state of the art all WYSIWYG does is slow you down and crap up all your final on page images This will of course dramatically change when everybody has and uses display PostScript I want a device independent gonzo justify routine that will run unmodi fied with any make and model of personal computer using any desired editor word processor or comm pro gram I want those same routines to be importable into nearly any Post Script application
271. ment for any real binding system padding compound is a quick and fun way of at least temporarily holding paper stacks together At any rate all of my beginning desktop publishing stu dents at EAC sure are getting off on the stuff For some reason the per scription pads seem to be popular An ordinary paintbrush works just fine and you can clean up with water before the padding compound sets You should carefully align and trim all the pages first and should apply some clamping pressure while your padding compound sets The stuff takes half an hour to dry and two thin coats are usually better than one thick one One jar is enough for a zillion and a half pads While nothing at all is needed in the way of special tools for just a few hand crafted pads to handle the job professionally you might want to build a padding press which looks sort of like a Fred Flintstone style enlarger The use of a clamping paper June 1988 cutter and a jogger are also handy production tools Note that many jiffy printing centers will do thick paper cutting for 50 cents a cut or so For minimum labor it is often best to pad the two opposite edges of an entire stack of full size sheets at once you then chop these up into four or six pads as needed By al ternating stacks of paper and the backing cardboard you can work several pads thick Tellyawhat For the contest this month just dream up a brand new but non obscene use for p
272. more detailed examples on how you gonzo justify real world output A key here is to use one or more templates and we will shortly look at both a very simple and a very detailed one But first let us review what the advantages and disadvantages of the gonzo method are The disadvan tages are simple 1 You have to think while you are using them and need at least a smattering of PostScript knowhow or programming ability and 2 You will not get the final page image on your screen unless you are already using Display PostScript Here are the main advantages 1 Its cheap because all you need is your favorite word processor 2 You have device independence since any computer at all works fine The author editor printer and proof reader could all be using wildly dif ferent brands of computers and word processors anywhere in the world on virtually any network 3 Your files are very compact typically 10K for a three column page layout with two figures 4 Production print speeds can be insanely faster typically two extra seconds per three column dual figure page after a simple pseudocompile is completed 5 Text artwork and graphics can all be done integrated within one sin gle word processing program 6 Justification quality at 300 DPI is exceptionally high including the automatic drop caps hanging punct uation a five stage progressive fill justification the full kerning and tab bing large
273. ms that there is a glut on the market for used old fashioned guillotine cutters Apparently what you have to do to get one is ask any specialty paper wholesaler since all of the specialty mills have gone to newer and more expensive cutters My own solution was to approach a local school and offer to sharpen and rebuild a broken old cutter of theirs in exchange for its free use This cost was all of 20 and the final appearance of all my self published books has now gone up sharply A cut above you might say The entries in our neat stuff con test are still pouring in Tellyawhat To turn all of this into an ongoing adventure for you I ll just give you the answers here Write or call all these people and see what you get I guarantee you will be absolutely amazed Bizarro Inc C and H Sales Hank Lee Jerryco Kelsey Lindsay Publications Meredith Instruments Small Parts Synergetics sneaky eh what and of course the good old Whole Earth Review How do I get Started Programming a IIgs Good question There are at least three different levels that you can use when writing machine and assembly language code for the IIgs The simplest level is to use the tools and resources you already did when you were back IIc and Ile pro gramming The intermediate level is to improve and upgrade these tools to include such things as the new 65816 instructions and all the IIgs toolbox fe N From Inside a machine o
274. mul objrot cos yi mul add yh add zi zh add px lineto psave def default distances from observer to picture plane xo 20 def left and right yo 80 def into picture avoid small values zo 40 def up and down avoid large values objrot 30 def demo remove before use 300 400 translate 5 dup scale this is the center horizon and the scale relative xy object rotation perspective grid 0 setlinewidth startat 0 def 0 setlinewidth 2 setlinecap 19 30 startat 0 px moveto 30 startat 0 px lineto stroke startat startat 10 add def repeat startat 30 def 7 startat 0 0 px moveto 0 100000 0 px lineto stroke startat startat 10 add def repeat 106 35 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen a non putrid gray a shaded perspective cube 2 setlinecap 2 setlinejoin 10 10 0 pm 0 0 30 prd 30 0 0 prd 0 0 30 prd closepath gsave 1 setgray fill grestore 0 2 setlinewidth stroke newpath 10 10 0 pm 0 0 30 prd 0 30 0 prd 0 0 30 prd closepath gsave 0 6 setgray fill grestore 0 2 setlinewidth stroke newpath 10 10 0 pm currentpoint newpath moveto 0 0 30 prm 30 0 0 prd 0 30 0 prd 30 0 0 prd closepath gsave 0 99 setgray fill grestore 0 2 setlinewidth stroke showpage Fig 5 Some of my Postscript perspective routines 37 4 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU April 1988 ell I still don t have my new LaserWriter yet Word has it that there are some minor teething problems with the new
275. my Micro Cookbooks volumes I and II my Enhancing your Apple Ie volumes I and II the AppleWriter Cookbook and my Apple Assembly Cookbook I do have lots of autographed copies on hand here at Synergetics And for PostScript anything including cus tom work just give me a call As always this is your column and 52 1 you can get tech help and off the wall networking per the end box Also as usual all of the names and numbers are gathered together at the end of this volume Our really stupendous biggie this month is that I ve finally gotten my PostScript speedup stuff up to where I can tell you about it Later on Pll show you how your Mac II or even a lowly 386 might now print PostScript almost as fast as you can by using AppleWriter on a IIe Lest you scoff at this please note that I now am doing book on demand printing of the typical three column 6000 character gonzo justified pages including two figures a header and footer with an apparently zero page makeready time The successive self collating pages pour out of my NTX printer at the full tilt 8 PPM rate for the entire book But first What Apple Books Are Available Figure one can give you a quick rundown of the more popular and easier to find of the Apple Computer authored books Many are published by Addison Wesley While I do stock the white LaserWriter Reference here at Synergetics you will find most of the others at most larger b
276. n each other The only cure I have found for this is to add a new back stop that is three inches down from the original one Actually what you really want is a guilotine style cutter with a cam type clamp that is good for a ton or more of holding pressure So for this month s contest either tell me about a reasonable source for clamping paper cutters or else find me a paper cutter salesperson that is not suffering from an acute case of recto cranial inversion What is this Month s PostScript Utility A sampling of some of my rubber grid utilities that are particularly handy for forms We did talk about the rubbergrid a few issues back so November 1987 what we ll focus on here is some simple support utilities Figure three shows you a typical form you might like to build up while figure four gives you several rubbergrid utilities that will greatly simplify creating the form Finally figure five gives you the actual PostScript code to print the non text portions of figure three Note how short quick and easy the code is Those xrpt and yrpt commands are incredibly flexible and extremely powerful The keys to the rubbergrid utilities are to use simple commands to draw lines and to include two powerful repeat routines that will create any selected number of lines of most any length and spacing Once on the grid your images can be scaled to any size you like The rubbergrid itself is most often turned
277. n to the default gray just use the new putridgray command There are now six different timer commands depending on what you want to do If you are only interested 45 4 in making one single time measure ment you can use stopwatchon and stopwatchoff If instead you wantto find out the accumulated time that gets spent inside certain PostScript procs you start off with a resettimer Then you do a starttimer every time you enter the proc followed by a stoptimer on each exit Finally you report the time back to the host with a reporttimer command The snoop command will activate superexec for your use For instance if a forall gives you an invalidaccess error a forall superexec often will not The same trick will often work for get superexec Calling snoop also does open up internaldict along with all its many strange and wondrous denizens Very handy And most interesting One of the extremely interesting routines in internaldict is FlxProc This takes a pair of cubic splines and using a highly unique erosion algo rithm converts any curved lines to straight or less bent ones as their size diminishes below a crucial value This is one key to PostScript s ability to attractively show any very small typography And snoop lets you view it anytime you like A 6 random command will return to you a random number in the range of zero to five Should you in fact really want a one to six result just tack
278. n kits and some fully modified and tested units are also available all at a tiny fraction of the current cost of the real Omnicrom fusion machines What is This Month s PostScript Utility Many downloadable fonts and lots of other PostScript utility programs are stored in an eexec data format As you might expect far and away the number one PostScript user demand on both the helpline and on our PostScript BBS is for a simple and easy way to read and understand all Va First set up the following messages wo N Then try these two tools can be reconstructed currentfile eexec 1 A two way communications environment that lets you receive and record error A method of transmitting a PostScript file up to a cursed character followed by a d An error trapper that dumps the stack such as on page 205 of the green book 4 The CHOPPER works by truncating the eexec file and seeing what kind of error messages you get back From the stack dump the eexec file can be reconstructed 5 The INSERTER works by adding an extra FF or AA into the eexec file and seeing what kind of error messages you get back From the stack dump the eexec file Here s a practice file to get you started 3a6407b312 073e1f86dc6433724cca95ce3654946cebf2cf38791da40c2cc45 1d47ce34c2f6c0f1 6a2032c50a9 68def6c962731e815302344a7Cc3919d99cel 14b84aab08fbed4e7a0a2af900f9e86efd82231015e6ea6a219d87e863cb56e2 153618cf3544d1a1217acba
279. n your black text and graphics If you quickly flip through your Computer Shopper you ll find lots of examples of duplex color use I have found a good way to fake duplex color on the LaserWriter or on any other laser printer or Xerox copier While it is not cheap and is not suited to high volume uses the results can be quite spectacular Here s what you do Say you want black words inside a blue box First you make a black toner copy of all the words Next make yourself a black toner copy of the box Now Kroy Kolor or Omnicolor the words Then you throw this printed sheet away and save the carrier Now look carefully at your color carrier You ll now have clear where the words were and blue elsewhere on the carrier Finally you reuse this negative carrier sheet over the black box The blue goes everywhere the words were not and the black shows through Instead of that usual printer s route of putting the color down first and then overlaying the black text you put the color on top letting the black show through only where you want words or border art Sneaky Huh Here s two additional Kroy Kolor tips In case you missed it last month we showed you several very cheap alternatives to those overpriced Kroy Kolor fusion machines Also if you take an empty Kroy Kolor carrier or else just a plain old half mil sheet of overlay clear mylar or polyester and then run it and a black toner copy through an iron
280. naldict Blue values anyone We have seen the full details on this in back columns and in Ask The Guru volume II One source of new fonts is ATF Kingsley One very major advantage Secret toner refill tools PostScript error trapper A serious AppleTalk bug Mini DIN 8 serial cabling Beginners two up notepads of ATF s font machinery is that you can intercept it for non linear trans formations This means you can now do true perspective and star wars lettering as much as 3000 times faster than when using Adobe fonts with their forced pixel line remapping Their first offerings are mostly calligraphic intended for awards and announcements Call ATF s Limell Schneiker for more details What will the next generation of LaserWriter s look like Well there already is a NTX J out which has improved handling of dual characters and is intended for use in Japan Beyond that look for a new 400 DPI engine sped up by semi interpreted PostScript firmware and an AMD 29000 RISC engine that does such things as BitBlts and cubic spline calculations directly in hardware Look for a special 400 x 800 mode that dramatically improves photo graphic halftone quality Possibly a B sized version good for 11 by 17 and possibly a duplex double sided printing option Possibly better hard Hgs printer RS423 RS232 mini DIN 8 male DB25 male or 1 7 DTR osr O N psp TXD TXD Ro O RXD DCD DCD se 4 7 sa RXD 8
281. nation of what all the nuisance commands do while figure five will give you all of the working code ready to download Included are new trig commands for the tangent arccosin and arcsin one word choices for backwards feet first frontwards and landscape prin ting excellent gray selections easier baud rate and handshaking set com mands simpler choice of the number of copies and job length a persistent downloading instant listing of cur rently resident fonts to host or page a sublime sneaky secret snooper that activates superexec a few repeatable timers and stopwatches a quite easy random number generator and a one word stopping of the test page Some of these new commands are specific to the LaserWriter while a few others are intended primarily for 300 DPI printing All the rest can be used pretty near anywhere The blackflash command ejects a totally black page For the highest possible print quality you eject two fully black pages before you do print your final copy This gives you some excellent black fills and light grays that are all highly uniform Speaking of which there are now four commands to pick useful grays instead of the seventeenth lousiest one that most PostScript applications seem to have their heart set on The bestgray is the all around best choice here a denser indiagray is available but requires care in use along with a reprogray that is ideal for reduced prepress If you ever want to retur
282. nce Bitmaps will not scale upward without that Hershey bar effect setting in and can also be extremely slow memory hogs But there are times and places when you might literally leap tall buildings in a single bound when you have scanmap or bitmap tools available For instance I have long been interested in non linear font transfor mations All of the usual linear font matrices only let you shift rotate or scale entire font characters I am far more interested in those non linear transformations that reach in and individually change the position and size of each and every pixel scan line in the character Uses Perspective lettering True three dimensional lettering Fonts forced to an exact outline Salvadore Dali like fonts that can lean or droop Lettering on an isometric cylinder Calligraphy on a parchment scroll Twisted fonts And of course nearly everyone wants those good old lean ing star wars messages A ferinstance As you know I am very big on doing book on demand printing In three illustrations in Ask the Guru volume II there was some perspective lettering that used my old pixel line remapping techniques The total imaging time for the lettering was over ninety minutes This rather cramps your style when you intend printing the entire book one copy at a time in less than half an hour Worse yet that pixel remapping required many thousands of font creations that totally trashed over the font cache This
283. ndfont 6 font9 Helvetica Bold findfont 6 specialty fonts font ZapfDingbats findfont 9 0 0 9 0 4 makefont setfont def font Symbol findfont 9 0 0 9 0 4 makefont setfont def default constants redefine for each application justx justL def txtwide 400 def width of column yinc 11 def line spacing charstretch 0 2 def minimum character kerning spacestretch 0 def minimum space kerning maxsstretch 2 5 def space fill stretch before character stretch maxcstretch 1 def maximum allowable fill character stretch dropcount 3 def lines indented for drop cap dropindent 40 def width reserved for drop cap pm 0 def paragraph margin pmnorm 10 def normal paragraph indent xpos 50 def horizontal start of text ypos 600 def vertical start of text colcheck def link to page or column maker here is a simple just dump the text pagebuilder Preceed your text by startgonzo or esc g and end it with esc s or esc x showpage d makefont setfont def makefont setfont def makefont setfont def oo 0600 0604 left justify ytop 600 def ypos ytop def ybot 50 def colcheck ypos ybot le showpage ypos ytop def if def Fig 2C Gonzo justify routines concluded J fusion machine or even run it back through your LaserWriter your toner image will Bakerize turning into a glossy and dense black that is quite durable Surprisingly so Try
284. ng the top edge A final shearing and you have a pair of your own high quality and easily customized note pads Figure five shows you the trivially simple code involved Note that my GONZO DL 6 and PS UTIL 6 must be persistently downloaded before this code can be run Several custom mods that all the desktop students did make last night included breaking the pencil line for names with descending characters substituting hearts airplanes and T squares for the pencil creating obscene variations alternate printing using all of the available astrobright colors and putting a giant light gray Zapf Calligraphic R smack in the middle of the writing area Please send me your best Post Script variations on a notepad theme There will be all the usual Incredible Secret Money Machine prizes and all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quests for your best entries Copyright c 1989 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All commercial rights reserved Personal use is permitted so long as this header remains both present and intact A work in progress disk for Apple Mac or IBM is available for 39 50 Requires persistent download of GONZO DL 6 and PS UTIL 6 or later Free printed copies on request Note 033 embedded escape gonzo begin ps util 1 begin nuisance begin printerror stepnrptparams begin twonote 1 2 1 395 0 20 20 true 10 false false def end repeatproc 0 0 10
285. now provide direct end user support at the corporate level This will add to and supplement the already existing AppleLink net work that is now available to the user groups developers and the dealers Apple end user support of course is long overdue Meanwhile in a totally unrelated development IBM has already intro duced a new stunningly spectacular end user corporate level resource that s named JBM Link They are to be congratulated on all of their pro gressive thinking and their ground breaking innovation here Especially in their uniquely orig inal name choice The Weitek people have now just completely updumped the PostScript applecart by coming out with a new hardware based RISC microcomputer that directly is able to execute all its PostScript commands ten to thirty times faster than the LaserWriter NT And do so at lower cost That s ten to thirty times not ten to thirty percent The speedup mainly lies in the difference between self compiling hardware versus interpreting soft ware A dedicated hardware engine is almost always much faster than using general purpose interpreted soft ware But obviously not nearly as flexible Weitek apparently chose a middle ground here in having such goodies as BitBlt transfers and cubic spline generation done rapidly in hardware while they still software interpret other PostScript commands So far the beast is neither fish nor fowl since it does not have the en d
286. nt4 Times Roman findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def font5 Times ltalic findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def font6 Times Bold findfont 9 0 0 9 0 0 makefont setfont def font7 Helvetica Bold findfont 6 0 0 6 0 0 makefont setfont def font8 Helvetica findfont 8 0 0 8 0 0 makefont setfont def font9 Helvetica Bold findfont 9 0 0 9 0 4 makefont setfont def font ZapfDingbats findfont 9 0 0 9 0 4 makefont setfont def font Symbol findfont 9 0 0 9 0 4 makefont setfont def txtwide 155 def yinc 10 5 def charstretch 0 2 def spacestretch 0 def maxsstretch 2 5 def maxcstretch 1 def dropcount 3 def dropindent 18 def pm 0 def ytop 720 def ypos ytop def xpos 100 def headerx 80 def headery 760 def headerwide 240 def ybot 80 def yparendadj 0 def pmnorm 10 def amacro zy0 stringmacro def start drop cap bmacro iFy1 stringmacro def finish drop cap cmacro zyC3 stringmacro def centered title dmacro pF1 stringmacro def normal text Fig 5 A gonzo column builder Guru template J 44 7 ASK THE GURU present or previous justification style that you have requested The analysis always assumes you are going to want a fill justify The input string is taken a character at a time and all the individual character widths for the presently selected font are then added up as a running total S requires gonzo dl 2 and guru temp 1 NOT
287. ntly using Rule number three is to verify the previous code before you install the patch This is most often done by reading the first few bytes of your target code in the patch area Rule number four is to make sure that any patches you made were in fact made the way you intended and in the correct place Do this by veri Va S WARNING If you try ANY shortcuts you may end up totally trashing your SCSI hard disk 1 Save the exact Ilgs machine state Get into the emulation mode with the emulation flag set to 1 a data bank register of 0 and a direct page register of 0 2 Verify that a Smartport controller is in the selected slot by checking for Cn01 20 Cn03 00 Cn05 03 and Cn07 00 Here n is the slot number Abort the eject if no smart port controller card is present 3 Calculate the Smartport controller entry address by adding the offset value in CnFF to Cn03 4 Make a Smartport STATUS 00 call with STATCODE 03 for the correct drive unit number to return the DIB Device Information Block Read the returned Device Type Byte and the Device Subtype Byte and verify Type 01 Subtype 00 for a Unidisk 3 5 or Type 01 and Subtype CO for an AppleDisk 3 5 Abort the eject if you do not have an Apple 3 5 drive with removable media 5 Issue a Smartport CONTROL command 04 with CONTROL CODE 04 to eject the disk 6 Restore the original machine state For more information see the Apple Ilgs Firmware Referen
288. nto the newer printer firmware that makes reportvlinemap rather tricky to use You can also use similar ideas on any system that has Display Post Script or on UNIX based PostScript printers that include the frametofile Note that the old LaserWriter is only needed for one post processing pass Once you have captured your scanmap or bitmap any PostScript printer can be used for reprintings Figure four shows how to get a single PostScript letter into a scan map while figure five shows how to convert the same letter from a scan map over to a bitmap Start with the Rscanmap array of figure four The bitmap is then created this way 96 96 createbitmap Rscanmap vlinetobitmap bitmaptohost Which returns this bitmap to your host Rbitmap lt S F8000000000000000000F800F8000000000000000000F800F8000000000000000000F800 F8000000000000000000F800F8000000000000000000F800F8000000000000000000F800 F8000000000000000001F800FC000000000000000001F800FC000000000000000001F800 FF00000000000 q kai F FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF800 EEFFFEFFFEFFEE FFEFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF800 FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFH FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF800 FEEFEFEFFFFEPEEFEFFPF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF800 EFEEEFFEREEEFFPEFREFP FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF800 PRFFFFFPFPPFPEFFFFFFFE FFFFFFFFFFFFFF800 FEFEFEEFEFEFFERFEFF 00000000000003F800 FC00000000000000000 V00003800000003F800 F800000000780000000 00007FC00000001F800 F80000000FFC0000000 DOO007FFCO0000003F800 00000001FFFC0000000 PUUDOOOOFFFFCO0000003F800 0000001FFF
289. o slow or too marginal for serious word processing uses At any rate let us look at some useful tools and resources Figure one gives you a partial listing I have always felt you should hand code a few hundred lines of machine language before you even think about going to an assembler or any more powerful tools This is the only way to fully and totally understand such things as addressing modes on their most fundamental level Some of the traditional and older programming tools include Apple s own EDASM assembler which can be helped along bunches by using AppleWriter for new way power editing I like to think that my own Micro Cookbooks volumes I and II and my own Apple Assembly Cook book are also both very useful and solid on fundamentals As additional resources the S C Software people have an interesting and useful assembler They also do stock many of the popular third party assembly books and utility routines Their Apple Assembly Line pub lication has secret insider IIgs info in it that s not to be found elsewhere Two IIgs specific books that are in the must have category are Gary Little s new Exploring the Apple IIgs and Eyes and Lichty s Programming the 65816 A P D A has them The current Apple thinking is to recommend doing all of your high level programming in the C lang uage and to use an assembler called ORCA M for all of your tightly linked machine language modules One very b
290. o be nice as would refill able toner cartridges and removal of the insidious font lockout that is now present on pathforall There are also some third party schemes underfoot to dramatically improve halftone imaging on all the Canon laser engines This is done by intensity modulating the laser dot size rather than using the fixed dot size as is done in the stock Apple and H P machnes The Visual Edge en hancer by Intel is one example of this type of product It does require some hardware printer mods Meanwhile the PostScript jugger naut rolls on Tektronix now has a new full color PostScript laser printer out that uses the Sharp thermal wax engine And Linotronic has come out with a new el cheapo Linotron 200 P PostScript phototypesetter The max resolution is 1700 DPI and the cost is down in the 29K range This is far less than their older machines Drill 5 8 inch hole using a 3 Vise Grip Unibit carefully clear all chips Fig 1 Adding a fresh toner filling hole to a SX cartridge 48 1 ASK THE GURU Adobe Systems is finally releasing details on all their great new Display Postscript systems They have both a free Display PostScript Overview for anyone and a 30 Display PostScript Technical Reference package for all of you serious developers Two of the active PostScript BBS systems now include 707 882 2290 and 713 688 1779 Shoptalk Radio Electronics has bought the old Popular E
291. o be the er better skip that one His monthly columns include both the Ask the Guru and LaserWriter Corner over in Computer Shopper and his Hardware Hacker column in Radio Electronics magazine Some of his other titles include his CMOS and million seller TTL Cookbooks Micro Cookbooks volumes I and II Enhancing your Apple II volumes I and II the AppleWriter Cookbook the Active Filter Cookbook Apple Assembly Cookbook his Hardware Hacker reprints Don Lancaster s PostScript Secrets and his Intro to PostScript video Don s current software offerings include his PostScript Show and Tell and PostScript Work in Progress plus a few companion disks for his various books Don is the head honcho of Synergetics a new age design and consulting firm that specializes in Apple computing laser printing PostScript program utilities electronic prototyping book on demand publishing technical writing and innovative software design His avocations include firefighting cave exploration bicycling and of course tinaja questing Don maintains a no charge voice helpline at 520 428 4073 He welcomes your calls and letters Best calling times are 8 5 weekdays Mountain Standard Time Ask the Guru Table of Contents The paper cutters Patching programs Rubbergrid utilities New LaserWriter ROM PostScript fundamentals Postscript dipdraw Reading Apple keys Black vs white write Printing onto anything An AppleT
292. ollating custom copy at a time on an Apple LaserWriter Thanks to some ultra sneaky programming and comm tricks this all happens at the wide open LaserWriter print speed The page makeready time is zero for most pages a trick that is trivially easy on the Apple Ile yet quite difficult on a Mac II or a 386 clone Because of all the toner reloading tricks you will read about here my LaserWriter per page toner costs are one fifteenth of the going rate Which helps make my laser printing economics more than cost competitive with jiffy printing Binding is via a Unibind toaster and shearing by way of borrowed time on a thirty party shear that I keep sharp for them My ongoing thanks to Computer Shopper editor Stan Veit for letting me say what I want to say when and how I want to say it Should you want to subscribe to Computer Shopper do give them at call at 407 269 3211 Ask the Guru iii Ask the Guru About the Author As he said in his classic Incredible Secret Money Machine Don Lancaster writes books And quests tinajas Microcomputer pioneer and guru Don Lancaster is now the author of 23 books and countless articles He is considered by some to be the father of the personal computer for his early ground breaking work with hacker digital electronics and low cost video terminal displays He is considered by others to be the patron saint of the Walter Mitties of the world And he is considered by yet others t
293. om sas ra peste gsi fast EEn og amp Sanaa ENO ToN ZDON 8085 EQER ESOR gt A SA Srey ORE co sri fas sacd ou o NSA BOG Bos 30 oO Eme Sea Gees JPosae wars rakS JSsee Sree Jesees ere EJ 2 a 5 f 2 Pa z 2 Ei o 8 ry lt 5 3 s So p 8 2 5 a er a8 Bo 8 F oon g8 2 a s E pa S g 33 oud 3 Pay PET PR EPA D 32 z 2 gt B 25 Sano Ea SE2om e eSnc 22 2A n BExro BON ato 2585 Baz BEEE z5 gele Seo asso 5852 33 lt 8 BROS See S SANY lt 8 EFFIN 253 Ses ZONG ger EINS SENN ERs Zong ESN seen 225 s Sou oer Bayt SSA EER wig Soa Srat SgS PED Gata Sale Bae ToS z5 2358 ET 3238 Ca 3 uids ziza S3 FERN 2a 8o xs Sug cae eff ear Taon G r e Gos E gt FS 5A s3 S238 eas S588 S53 BANOS SKER TEN SZ SS CARRS res asee ake sa F8 agar ekae snne J eses E 5 ps O w Ed 3 z ent c 2 s a amp a 5 2 g Q 3s S 8 E no 35 H g z wo fa Ste 2 o s g 2e 3 Sie z5 3 S O as 258 2 2 2 sb gs e 28 33 s Sa o o Sere wo No 20 Ze Sse gs SNe fo len SSE E R z3 Z bse ons gy Fok O o pres 8253 5 5 Eas Spis T of DDS sacs 2 lt 8 SKg H sod SENG 22N aRES 280k 2 B37 EON BENS 5 ss Exo 6 Stes sida ot ERP gEEo SSS acct Bean Toog as Q SSS EPR gt a LEER Sook atso S CZs D 5D Sseot 3 eggs Bee or 8 Ss esc ES aZo SS 2902 zoN Zug eas zona 38 oe aZe E p o Sag Bxns5 sess 203 Eris 2328 ix2s 238 Pigs sxss 255 SSS Fa ESS s 545 5325 S3eq 2805 mM 2228 353839 Eg S oxe FES AEL zs ERSAN g So r
294. ome Two important books include the ProDOS Techncal Reference Man ual by Addison Wesley and Beneath Apple ProDOS by Quality Software Reconstruction software includes the Copy II Plus from Central Point Software and Bag Of Tricks II again from Quality Software The first thing to try is a fresh reboot of your machine followed by several repeated attempts to read the disk Then try the other drive If that doesn t hack it try a different com puter A disk may get flakey before it gets bad Obviously you will want to transfer the data any way you can The very next thing to check for is obvious physical damage If the disk got tricycled by a three year old or run over by an office chair it can often be repaired by cutting the top off the disk and inserting it in a new disk carrier preferably of the same brand and style Don t touch the my lar media when you do this If a disk has been re initialized then all is lost You can run over a disk with a truck and then boil both the disk and the truck in peanut butter and jelly and the chances are you can recover some of the data But Init kills So do not ever init a disk without first removing it from the drive holding it by the write protect tab and spelling the name out backwards and out loud With all other drive doors open Never copy a disk without write protect tabs Remember that 5 1 4 inch disks protect backwards from the 3 1 2 inch ones An open notch on a
295. on a custom basis Write or call if you are interested in this or any of my other PostScript goodies I have got neat stuff not available elsewhere for everyone from a bare novice to the most gonzo of you advanced Postscript developers Let s hear from you March 1988 Fig 4 And two keystrokes later once again N Copyright c 1988 by Don Lancaster amp Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal non commercial use permitted so long as this header remains both present and intact perspective transform converts x y z into X and Y on stack px zz exch def yy exch def xx exch def yo dup yy add div xx xo sub mul yo dup yy add div zz zo sub mul def save and restore previous x y z position psave zh zz def yh yy def xh xx def def prestore zz zh def yy yh def xx xh def def pm px psave moveto def perspective absolute move x y z and hold pd px psave lineto def pd perspective absolute draw x y z and hold prm perspective relative x y z move with objrot rotation prm zi exch def yi exch def xi exch def objrot cos xi mul objrot sin yi mul sub xh add objrot sin xi mul objrot cos yi mul add yh add zi zh add px moveto psave def prd perspective relative x y z draw with objrot rotation prd zi exch def yi exch def xi exch def objrot cos xi mul objrot sin yi mul sub xh add objrot sin xi
296. ons of the latest updates on many of my previous PostScript goodies now appears in my new Don Lancaster s PostScript Secrets av ailable for most popular computers Write or call for more info S b substitute backspace f substitute formfeed n substitute linefeed r substitute carriage return t substitute tab substitute opening parenthesis substitute closing parenthesis substitute reverse slash nnn substitute ASCII character of octal code nnn For instance 320 is an em dash Any other character following a reverse slash gets ignored This is one convenient way of supressing any unwanted carriage returns forced by the formatting code in some word processors With the input text scanner of figure four all of these reverse slash commands may be modified or extended in any manner Fig 5 PostScript reverse slash string substitution commands J 42 6 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU September 1988 just got back from the AZ Apple Fiesta and assembly language developers conference One big thing that struck me right off the top was how the style and flavor of all the leading Apple IIc Ie and IIgs assembly tools exactly reflects the personalities and mind sets of their creators While lots of useful results and otherwise good vibes came from the conference the key problem of the totally unacceptable frustration level of the current IIgs programmin
297. onth s PostScript Utility Helpline callers often ask me why they should bother learning and using raw PostScript when there are all of those canned page making and illustration applications programs that are just sitting out there Well first PostScript is lots of fun and is insanely addictive That should be enough of an answer right there At least for you new age types Second your own PostScript code can often run ridiculously faster than all the canned stuff A three column 6000 character gonzo justified layout with two figures a header and a footer should only take three seconds or so above the normal paper feeding speed when you use your own code Third you can often get a higher quality final printed result especially when it comes to such things as text justification a decent looking gray smooth curves unusual borders or effective step and repeat procs And fourth using raw PostScript lets you do things in your own way rather than by using stuff that some one else decided just absolutely had to be good for you But far and away the most compel ling reason to learn and use raw PostScript is that it often lets you easily and quickly do things that would seem impossible or extremely difficult to do with those canned ap plications programs Let s look at printing an intelligent directory as an example But before we do and to put my money where my mouth is let s have another one of our stup
298. onth Namely some sneaky tricks that will blindingly speed up all your PostScript print times to the point where most jobs will print at the full page feeding speed of your printer with believe it or don t zero make ready or pre processing time Sadly this one has to wait till next month because one or two final details are not yet fully in place Instead lets back way off and have some quick and easy fun by using a simple new PostScript routine Remember those Super Spirograph toys Figure four shows you some of the interesting things you can do with spirograph code as written directly in PostScript while figure five shows you the rather simple code routines that are involved All we really have here is a wheel rotating around a second wheel with some integer ratio set between those two wheel diameters If the outside wheel is smaller in diameter than the inside you will get curley circles if the outside wheel is much larger than the inside you get those cusps The ratios of the wheel diameters decide the number of the repeats per revolution of the inside wheel Make a zillion trips around and you get a negative image with those chords in them Unlike real spirograph toys your pen hole location can easily exceed the diameter of your outside wheel for special effects With several simple modifications you can do spirals or work along an arbitrary path Thus this simple Post Script code is a major improvement ove
299. ookstores For newer and more specialized Apple software and books check out A P D A for a complete listing Two other interesting new Apple publications are their free Vertical Markets Directory and their ongoing Community Affairs News Are There Any More GS OS Bugs Lots of them In fact it is getting so bad that I have totally run out of adjectives which might adequately describe this ongoing travesty So for our first of the three contests this month please send me a fresh supply of suitable GS OS adjectives Please obey all postal obscenity regulations There will be all the usual Incredible Secret Money Machine books for the top twenty along with an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two for the very best of all We have already seen how GS OS prevents you from ever resetting into an application and even encourages disk trashing on arbitrary resets Another bug involves a misprint in the original GS OS documentation It turns out that the page zero memory locations 5A through 5F are very much reserved for internal GS OS use These are most definitely not available for any printer driver use despite the early documentation The really bad GS OS bug of the month though is that Apple requires you to sign the papers that you are certifiably insane before you do use GS OS to copy a 5 1 4 inch disk to a 3 1 2 inch one The GS OS system believe it or not demands that you always use an unlocked s
300. opular of the two connections as one trans mitter will look at the other receiver and vice versa On either of these cables the usual mistakes that everyone will make is forgetting to float the TXD output or forgetting to ground that RXD input Once again it is the differ ential current between RXD and RXD that gets sensed Additional cable variations appear appear in Ask the Guru volume I Complete cable assemblies are ready to go at much lower than Apple prices from either Redmond Cable or else from the Microcomputer Cable Company Why Does AppleTalk Badly Foul up the LaserWriter Darned if I know Ask Apple At any rate there is an extremely bizarre bug in AppleTalk that can blatently violate PostScript s device indepen dence And it can drive you up the wall if you do not understand it We found it when the Apple VAX and the IBM people in my begining PostScript class all were grinding out outstanding typography while the Mac people were totally trashing all their output And they all were using absolutely identical work files What happens is that the same file sent serially gets treated differently when sent by AppleTalk That stan dard and thoroughly documented PostScript serial interface will auto matically convert all carriage returns into 10 newline characters while AppleTalk does not Which means that custom input scanners will behave differently if the file is sent over AppleTalk ra
301. ork server and as a job printer that is possibly even as powerful as AppleWriter s WPL A snapshot ability for final bitmaps would be even handier Meanwhile NEC has come out with a new LC 790 PostScript laser less laser printer using a LED strip array that seems to be garnering an awful lot of user helpline support Eveyone who has gotten even re motely near this machine has been wildly enthuasastic And yes those NEC toner cartridges are both re fillable and reconditionable Either factory or third party Actually those very high Laser Writer II per page toner costs could kill the new machines in their tracks A knowledgeable LaserWriter Plus owner can do his own toner refills for as little as 0 32 cents per page The May 1988 NEC machine toner costs around 1 2 cents per page and this can be cut in half or less by the usual third party techniques This compares with a nickel per page their way toner CS DEMO 1 An APW example of how to start up various H toolsets get quickdraw in gear clear the 640 super HIRES screen to a selected color and hang the machine for viewing KEEP CSD 1 save final copies MAIN START CASE ON be case sensitive MLOAD libraries ainclude m16 locator MLOAD libraries ainclude m16 memory MLOAD libraries ainclude m16 misctool MLOAD libraries ainclude m16 event _TLStartUP start the tool locator pla sta MYID and save the user i d _MMS
302. orsement of either Adobe or Apple Those also rans are sure glomping onto this jewel though Apple continues to keep their head in the sand on this laboring under the delusion that QuickDraw is in some manner remotely useable while completely ignoring all of the over whelming advantages of standard display PostScript Nobody bothered to tell them that QuickDraw never had been is not now and is highly unlikely to ever become a viable page description language The laser printers that use Quick Draw instead of PostScript are all an outright joke Not to mention in my humble opinion being a total ripoff Hopefully though at least one Pa S sco1s ve eea be 1 vertical blanking 0 active scan scoz ul ss Jefe or L J vertical Isb a Ae horizontal position counter scoze eu e Tee Xe v I vertical even line counter Fig 1 Those secret Ilgs screen locking locations J 42 1 IIgs numeric toolkit listing An exact IIgs video locking Post justification edit ideas Handicapped tech resources Postscript input text scanner third party should soon have display PostScript available for the Mac and the IIgs possibly including a hard ware speedup engine More on this whenever and wherever Details on writing your own IIgs port and print drivers now appear in the Apple IIgs Technical Notes 36 and 37 These should be available through the usual BBS and your user group librar
303. os 0 2 sub moveto show 1 0 translate pin pin dir add def repeat def stretchprint dup stringwidth pop 2 div neg exch length 1 sub stretch mul 2 div sub 0 moveto callout anchorsearch true eq currentpoint exch stretch add exch moveto pop dup callout exch def stringwidth pop callout length 1 sub stretch mul add barwide exch def 0 033 setlinewidth gsave currentpoint 0 55 add moveto barwide 0 rlineto stroke grestore if stretch 0 callout ashow def pincallouts O vpos translate workstring search true eq callout exch def pop workstring exch def callout stretchprint 1 0 translate dup callout exch def stretchprint exit ifelse loop def actual dipdraw process starts here the outline gsave 1 setlinecap 1 setlinejoin currentpoint translate newpath 55 45 0 15 0 360 arc fill newpath 1 howhigh 2 div 0 7 90 90 arc 0 stub rlineto howlong 0 rlineto 0 howhigh neg rlineto howlong neg 0 rlineto closepath 0 36 setlinewidth stroke pin circles and numbers Helvetica Bold findfont 0 4 0 0 0 55 0 0 makefont setfont gsave pin 1 def dir 1 def cpos 0 def pinproc grestore gsave pin numpins def dir 1 def cpos howhigh def pinproc grestore pin callouts Helvetica findfont 0 35 0 0 0 6 0 0 makefont setfont stretch 0 033 def gsave workstring hipins def vpos 0 6 def pincallouts grestore gsave workstring lopins def vpos howhigh 1 05 sub def pincallouts grestore device number Helve
304. osed apple symbols as you might need for an Apple book or software manual or whatever While the Symbol 360 character prints as a solid apple on all Laser Writer versions it may or may not on competing brands of PostScript prin ters So this just might end up as machine specific code Figure four is a standard point grid that is most handy for layout work One possible listing of PostScript code for this appears in figure five The grid can be shown either in a black or in a light gray I ve shown you the gray version here The ob vious advantage of gray is that you can overwrite it with all of your final real PostScript images The code of figure five can fill an entire sheet I ve only shown you the lower left corner of the grid in figure four By the way it usually will pay to offset your grid into the printable area of the sheet putting the grid origin at 30 30 and then doing a 30 30 translate before you start your PostScript work This will both look better and give you fewer suprises You can also xerox onto sheets with preprinted layout grids on them That can greatly simplify such things as curve tracing digitized signatures custom logos and stuff like this While the rubbergrid we looked at previously can give you perfect and single pixel dot crossings this true standard point gray grid apparently can not since an exact size has to be February 1988 maintained The black grid does not share this p
305. others will automatically get shoved around each page or between pages or columns as needed December 1989 Figure three shows you a typical directory page before folding while the PostScript code for the internal pages is shown in figure four Most of the self addressing and auto mailing Post Script cover code appears in figure five Note that the addressing gets done at the same time the rest of the cover is printed This does require my gonzo justify stuff we looked at in the October 1988 Computer Shopper Write or call for a free printed listing This is also available ready to run on my Work in Progress disk and in Ask The Guru volume II Each sub page uses a gray border with the organization name at the top and the page number at the bottom The input list is scanned between selected markers which can let you have three four or even five lines in the address without any hassles In this example five percent signs are used as the delimiting marker You can substitute any delimiter you like It is up to your word processor or whatever to select the printing versus non printing lines In the case of AppleWriter any data line that starts with a period gets ignored This lets you put hidden lines into each entry To drop out the phone number on the actual addressing you can either pre fix your number with a period or else search and replace the list and eliminate any line that starts with an opening parenthesis
306. ource disk Otherwise it will refuse to make the copy and returns an error message back to you Outside of the obvious solution of avoiding GS OS like the plague the only sane workaround I can think of is to initally copy your 5 1 4 locked original on to a new 5 1 4 unlocked intermediate Then use this unlocked intermediate disk to do the actual copy to your 3 1 2 inch disk Is Jogging Really An Aerobic Exercise Not really especially if you can avoid it A jogger is a beastie that some epsilon minus of a printing equipment salesperson will charge you 300 to 800 for Jogging is used to shake pages down so they can go into a binder or can otherwise end up with smooth edges Properly done June 1989 jogging will eliminate most if not all unglued pages and can even elim inate the need for an edge trim on some jobs Jogging is just about es sential when you are padding your perscription forms notepads or a calendar And machine jogging is far more fun than forever whapping the page edges with a spoon Uh it seems I was in K Mart the other day and they are selling Black and Decker Model 7448 finishing sanders for 24 or so Now just ask any printing equip ment salesperson and they ll gladly tell you that one way you can build a 24 sander is to take their 600 jogger and remove their paper tray and re place it with a piece of sandpaper On the other hand Any More Desktop Publishing Loose Ends Lot
307. outine used by baud 57600 x 25 and company feetfirst Eject the page rightside up or feet first inch Change size to inches as in 3 inch for a 3 inch line indiagray A very fine 133 line 25 degree gray with 6 gray levels Requires care landscape Switch to landscape mode printing wider than high lightgray Select the lightest available gray listfonts Send a list of all resident fonts back to the host longjob Lengthen the wait timeout to 3 minutes Gives the host extra disk time manual Select manual rather than tray feed For thick or oddball paper stock negative Print white as black and black as white Useful for reversals notestpage Cancel the test page that is printed on startup outline Find the outline path of the current character persist Do a persistent download of the code that follows pi The math constant 3 1415926 pixel Scale to 300 DPI pixels rather than points positive Restore normal printing after using negative printfonts Print a list of all resident fonts onto the page putridgray Restore the default 53 DPI 45 degree gray screen random Generate a random number 6 random returns 0 5 report Return top of stack to host and stall briefly reprogray A good 85 DPI 35 degree gray for reduced prepress output resetttimer Initialize multiple time interval measurement See starttimer stoptimer and reporttimer Use stopwatchon and stopwatchoff for single shots For instance two time intervals would be measur
308. override the casssette input at the output of its op amp Figure one shows you this old game socket and its connections With the IIc a new 9 pin DB 9 back panel connector was introduced This let you use much more rugged connectors on your paddles and joy sticks and now did let you plug or unplug without taking the machine apart On the other hand it dropped the four annunciator outputs and the strobe and all of those really neat quick and dirty I O tricks you could do with them Figure two shows you this new game socket and its connections The Apple Ile did give you both connectors and let you have the best of both possible worlds In theory so did the IIgs Only early versions of the IIgs left off the strobe output for some inexplicable reason Strobe just plain is not there Hopefully this will someday be restored At any rate you might like to use old paddles on a new machine or vice versa Figure three shows you the two adapters you will need to either get from the old paddles to a new connector or from new paddles to an old connector Since the old IIgs game paddle connector is far and away the fastest way of doing your 57600 baud serial LaserWriter communications this is insanely faster than is use of Apple Talk there seems to be a bunch of renewed interest in what you can really do with that internal game con nector More on this whenever One tip If you are still using the o
309. ow you how to refill these cartridges But I have yet to receive one that was not so badly scratched that there was no point in refilling it Others report a 33 percent one time SX refillability rate Some refillers do report excellent refilling success if they immediately remove all of the toner from a factory fresh cartridge and replace it with a suitable third party toner They often will pass on the original toner on to their local diesel mechanic for use as valve grinding compound O K here s what has to be done and done now The SX cartridges must be dramatically reduced in price and then absolutely must be made refillable by the end user A toner that is far less abrasive must be used A drum that is far more scratch resistant must be used A good drum conditioner and or lubricant must be added The poor engineering on the S TEMPERATURE normal Fig 3 Full size temperature dial decal artwork J 43 2 ASK THE GURU drum wipers that cause scratching must be completely redone I sure would like to employ my fast and shiny new NTX for my production work here at Synergetics But I am instead forced into still using my 300 000 copy long in the tooth LaserWriter Plus The obscene per page toner costs and the scratchy images on the NTX simply are not acceptable Please continue to send along all your SX horror stories More on this as the drama unfolds Tell me About Omnicrom and Kroy
310. p You then use either a chopper tool that downloads the file up to a cursed character followed by a d end of file or else an inserter tool that adds an extra FF or an AA into the eexec file hex pair data stream With either tool the error trapper s error message and stack dump will return enough information that most portions of most eexec files can now readily be reconstructed There are advantages and limita tions to both the chopper and the inserter There are also advantages and limitations to working forward or backward through the eexec file I will let you check out and explore all of these on your own Figure seven also does give you a sample fragment of an eexec file and its standard text equivalent Use this for practice before you begin More powerful tools can easily be added to speed up and automate the eexec sight reading process Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU October 1988 oy a whole flock of them flew over that time Apple has at long last officially flushed Pascal Pascal was basically a laboratory animal that had escaped Unfortunately it did do an incredible and incalculable amount of damage to both academia and general computer literacy well before its long overdue extermination The heir apparent would seem to be the C language helped along by some closely linked and tightly writ ten assembly language modules The APW development system on the IIgs and the MPW d
311. p more true def exit if end string on linefeed dup 114 eq pop more true def exit if end string on return dup 48 ge dup 55 le dooctal if if 1000 eq pop 1 sub dup 1 add 0 ifelse dooctal 48 sub 64 mul oct exch def currentfile read not pop more false def exit if dup 48 ge dup 55 le dothird 1000 ifelse if def dothird 48 sub 8 mul oct add oct exch def currentfile read not pop more false def exit if dup 48 ge dup 55 le 48 sub oct add if 1000 if def exitproc pop currentfile read not pop more false def exit if dup exitchar eq pop exit exch scanstr exch 27 put exch 1 add dup 3 1 roll ifelse def substitute or replicate def esc g startscan def an alias for startscan esc x def reserve esc x to exit Fig 4 PostScript code for an input text scanner S 42 4 ASK THE GURU There is an outfit called Photo labels that makes photographic prints directly onto thin and self stick photo paper with prices starting at twenty cents each in small quantities This can be one sneaky way to add full color to all your present desktop publishing capabilities You just peel and stick these onto whatever it is you are already printing Several different sizes are available ranging from postage stamp up to post card formats Calendars are one obvious possi bility as are realtor listings What others can you think of Actually real color printing ne
312. p 1 4 inch off of both ends of the green wire and solder one end to this resistor loop See Figure six Strip 1 4 inch off both ends of the black wire and solder it to the leftmost lug of the volume control when viewed from the rear bottom See Figure six Strip 1 4 inch off both ends of the red wire and solder it to the rightmost lug of the volume control when viewed from the rear bottom See Figure six Twist all three wires tightly together for all but the last inch of their length Unplug the black and white motor connector from the innermost circuit board Unplug the two heavy red wires from the motor speed sensing power resistor Remove the three large Phillips screws that hold the circuit boards in place You may have to restrain the white circuit board spacers to keep them from turning when you do Slide the two circuit boards out where you can work on them You may have to work some slack in the yellow thermistor wires Unplug the five pin black and blue Verify that the yellow thermistor wires go to a FH1 0576 01 printed circuit board Route the twisted black red and green wire between the motor starting capacitor and the motor control power triac Then route it along the yellow wire through the small hole and to the FH1 0576 01 printed circuit board Loop and solder the black wire to the inside end of diode D303 See Figure six Loop and solder the green wire to the outside end of resistor R307 Loop and solder the red wir
313. percent return My current recommendation on Adobe is to buy at 24 and sell at 37 At this writing several of the OTC stocks that have not recovered from last October s lateral arabesque do include Circle Express Carver and Siliconix Check them out Just be sure to remember that this is free advice and worth every cent of it After all look at me I started out with nothing and I still have most of it left Can you Laser Print Onto Transparent Materials You might want to laser print onto transparent material for an overhead transparency for a printed circuit or dialplate art master for any repair stick on patches for a store or auto window decal or simply to get a high gloss final result There are two popular transparent graphics art materials acetate and polyester Polyester sometimes gets called by its DuPont mylar trade name These are the same Available thicknesses vary all over the lot but 2 mils for self stick or 5 mils for stand alone are often a good choice Both clear and matte finishes are available In general toner sticks beautifully to either material giving very dense and very solid blacks Acetate is cheap but has very poor dimensional stability and melts well below the fusion roller temperature You should never feed unsupported acetate to a laser printer as it will certainly glop up the works Some self stick acetates can be run through a laser printer if the support backing is th
314. pt printer which you helpline callers can t seem to say enough good things about 4 Any of the PostScript speaking laser printers from QMS 5 The Hewlett Packard Laserjet II But beware that this turkey pro vides PostScript only in a rather expensive and very bizarre manner that demands use of an IBM clone But you definitely should not buy any of these until such time as you have had some hands on experience with them running your material your way through your local user group I personally own a pair of Laser Writer pluses one with over 300 000 copies on it and now have a brand new NTX I just can t believe I was able to squeak by so long with only two PostScript speaking printers in my home On the other hand the light in the pantry still is not fixed I guess its all in the priorities Does anyone know an electrician that needs some typesetting done What is Padding Compound Well it comes in a large jar the same size and shape as the library paste you used to eat with Cecilia Winterhalter back in Mrs Lockhart s second grade art class It does cost around 5 50 a jar and is available from Paper Plus or most any other printer supply house It does look sort of like Elmer s glue all You paint this glop onto the edge of a stack of paper and end up with an instant notepad fully pro fessional prescription pads a while you were out form or even several custom calanders While not at all a replace
315. puter is when and how all of the NTSC frame grabbing and genlocking will be done After that gets decided then and only then should you pick a CPU ROM RAM and all the other frivolous addons that surround your fundamental video interface There have long been rumors of a super version of AppleWriter that handles a 256K work file includes a spelling checker and provides other assorted goodies Well I have finally tracked this dude down It was first known as Super Applewriter III Just Ilgs video out DB15 male O ground red video D composite sync D green video ground blue video ground Fig 1 Ilgs video cable for the NEC Multisync monitor S Multisync analog video in DB9 male 37 1 Perspective drawing Help on the Apple HI Self publishing secrets Alternate IIgs monitors INH problems on the IIgs as the Apple II was being flushed a few bootleg copies were released to user groups by Apple Chances are you can get a copy if you do ask the right III hacker To snoop start from ProDOS insert the SOS disk and then you do a BLOAD SOS INTERP A 57F2 T 0C At any rate it turns out this code was older and less powerful than Ap pleWriter 2 0 or 2 1 except for that larger workfile and the new spelling checker The memory was handled in banks of 32K each and you could select as many as you needed The bank switching was apparentl
316. r So there is now a beastie called the Lassco Corner Rounder that is manufactured by Lassco Products This will round a stack of sheets at once and accepts various dies with 1 8 inch and 1 4 inch being the most popular The list price is 120 but these sometimes get discounted down into the 85 to 95 range As with virtually all of the other accessory salesmen for the printer trade you ll find most of the Lassco dealers grossly incompetent ridicu lously overpriced and unbelievably rude Lassco of course will tell you with a perfectly straight face to see your dealer By the way if you re only inter ested in printing Beta or VHS box spline and face video labels several cheap and attractive blanks are now available from the Polyline Corp And if you need great heaping bunches of custom labels or label blanks of most any size you might try my neighbor down the street Hy Tech Identification Products What is this month s PostScript utility Well this month I thought I would bring you up to date on the pitfalls and opportunities of laser printed business cards and similiar items Firstoff there is no way you can compete one on one with the existing standard layout card sources Several loss leader ads in the Wall Street Journal will give you one thousand raised print cards for around 8 And there is also no way that toner can be made as durable as regular ink let alone raised print thermography T
317. r around 79 95 There is a free catalog cleverly disguised as a shopper s newsletter called The Printer s Shopper which lists an incredible variety of printer and printshop accessories especially stuff of interest to beginning desktop publishers Their prices are not all Va 1 Let the laser printer run continuously Every time you power down the font cache and any persistent downloads will get trashed 2 Use the latest version PostScript engine and firmware Each newer version has averaged 30 percent faster than the previous one 3 Use the fastest possible comm channel The fastest is the SCSI hard disk on the NTX Second fastest is an honest and unburdened 57600 baud serial channel Note that Appletalk with its heavy software overhead can often end up significantly slower than 9600 baud 4 Persistently download all common templates justification routines drawing utilities font calls and whatever Avoid ever carrying anything inside a file that can be shared with previous or following files 5 Bind all procedures when and where appropriate This can result in a free ten to fifteen percent speedup of much of your PostScript code 6 Use a two step process where you first get your images printing exactly the way you want them Then use the following steps to speed up reruns for later book on demand or other repeat printing 7 Carefully measure your communications and execution times to find the bottlenecks
318. r decimal places which is more than enough for fixed text positioning by dropping any unneeded leading and trailing zeros and by omitting the always repeating constants of 32 for Va 536 8 217 6 2 5 3555 In z 428 3 196 6 2 235 2 and the z 505 3 196 6 2 235 2 commands z 545 2 165 1 8286 2 if z 400 154 6 1 25 2 you need one z 400 123 1 1 79 2 volume II of z 516 6 123 1 1 79 2 in stock z N 400 249 1 2 5 2889 disk drives lack of color and the z 400 238 6 0 2 market focus that is far too narrow z 410 228 1 1 348 2 Apple has now released their new z 400 207 1 2 338 2 cluded are complete lists of all the z 400 186 1 1 108 2 secrets of hard disk access interface z 400 175 6 2 073 2 details the works do have a few z 400 165 1 8286 2 copies in stock here at z 410 144 1 2 5 3539 Speaking of which we do have z 400 133 6 1 642 2 autographed copies of volume and z 400 112 6 1 271 2 now as well as volume II of all my z 475 6 102 1 1 424 2 stuff And if you z 400 91 6 4401 2 need the very latest and the very best z 400 81 1 4493 2 of all my PostScript goodies do look z 400 70 6 1 25 2 into my z 511 1 70 6 1 25 2 disks z font2 99 25 522 1 858 2 Computer Reseller z 102 6 364 6 9473 2 AppleWorks z 158 4 364 6 9473 2 PC Transpor z 60 354 1 7139 2 ter z 230 501 1 1 531 2 Brooklyn Bridge z 307 4 301 6 1 244 2 File System Trans z 230 291 1 1279 2 lator z 464 5
319. r after 1700 pages The second cartridge de veloped two really awful scratches long before it ran out of toner The third cartridge had a total mechanical jam when received and delivered zero copies That fourth cartridge developed more serious scratches again long before running out of toner For some very strange reason I am hesistant to so much as remove the fifth cartridge from its shipping box September 1988 N 1 Canon F21680 Fusion machine using a FH1 0576 01 temperature pc card abe E EN l 25K linear volume control 150K 1 2 watt resistor Dialplate decal Dialplate decal overlay Push on knob with pointer 12 inches of red solid 22 hookup wire 12 inches of similar green wire 12 inches of similar black wire 8 inches of solder two 3 8 inch volume control nuts 1 flat volume control washer 1 internal tooth volume control lockwasher Note One source of the Canon fusion machines parts kits and modified and tested units is Arlin Shepard at Lazer Products 12741 E Caley Avenue Suite 130 Englewood CO 80111 303 792 5277 Fig 2 Parts list for a cheap Omnicrom fusion machine J Canon is currently batting 000 at least in this inning A trade to Balti more is imminent I have asked around and I am shocked to report that I have found no one using these cartridges that did not have their own equally bad horror stories to relate I would dearly love to sh
320. r assembly language program CLC XCE To get into the native mode SEC XCE To get into the emulation mode REP 10 For an 8 bit accumulator and memory SEP 10 For a 16 bit accumulator and memory REP 20 For 8 bix X and Y registers SEP 20 For 16 bit X and Y registers From the monitor Lister m For 8 bit accumulator and memory O m For 16 bit accumulator and memory 1 x For 8 bit X and Y registers O x For 16 bit X and Y registers Fig 2 How to change the Ilgs operating modes N J 36 2 calls And the highest level is to go and use the ultimate weapons along with the full blown Hgs development environment with its fully relocatable code APW is good for this The irony of all this is that it is not at all clear which level will give you the best final results To play the IIgs game their way using the ultimate weapons involves a lot of learning a ridiculous amount of time plus an awful lot of frustration Worse yet many of the toolbox routines are in excusably and intolerably slow and can in no way compare to the hand crafting of fixed position traditional Ie style code Examples of this sort of thing are the serial interface circuitry parts of which are thirty times slower than on a Ile AppleTalk firmware and proto cols that slow down what should be a 240K baud rate to much less than plain old 9600 baud and the text and screen tools that are just plain to
321. r convenience market a four foot cube In it are CD ROM PostScript data bases for 75 thousand popular books The phone line that goes into the wall is connectable to 75 million more titles Make a keyboard entry and out pops a custom bound book 6 for a paperback or 9 for hard bound With of course the buyer s name in gold on the cover The advantages and economics to creating only books that are needed and wanted are overwhelming There are no shipping charges no distrib utors or multi tier distribution no shopworn or dog eared volumes no returns no stocking decisions no fighting for shelf space or visibility and no remainders And no more of the IRS paying publishers to shred books like it now insists on doing No inventory means no backlist tax All titles now instantly available Anyplace anytime There s no such thing as an out of print book Ever Because of the superb economics authors could now actually be paid a living wage Say 20 percent of the final selling price of all copies sold for a beginning author 25 percent for a proven writer and as much as 33 percent for a gonzo best seller And payment could be an instant banking credit for the better selling authors With returns and all those similar ripoffs virtually unheard of 46 3 The quaint and arcane concept of getting a manuscript accepted now would cease to be meaningful as the process would end up as complicated as qual
322. r page sides in reverse order Then it will ring a bell let you reload the pages and then print all of the front page sides in reverse order thus delivering to you a ready to bind book As a different example figure one shows you a new WPL program that solves a sticky problem of mine Any time you are writing your own Post Script code you have to enter a long definition to create a font Something like Bookman Demiltalic findfont 9 0 0 9 25 0 0 makefont setfont or whatever It is super important to both remember and get all of those wierd font name spellings correct On an open apple f command this WPL program creates a screen that will give you a list of all those available fonts It then asks you to make a font selection followed by a font width and font height in points Finally it will insert that correctly spelled definition into your current text file and automatically return you to your word processing Around seven easy and intuitive keystrokes can replace several dozen very hard to remember ones You will have to predefine your open apple f as the glossary entry that executes this WPL routine WPL was Paul Lutus at his very N gonzo begin workdict 100 dict def workdict begin ytop 550 def ypos ytop def ybot 50 def xpos 125 def txtwide 450 def pagenum 1 def pnxpos txtwide 2 div xpos add def pnypos ytop 19 add def showpagenumber pagenum pagenum 1 add def pnxpos pnypos pagenum
323. r the original spirograph toys So for our second big contest this month just show me some variation on the spirograph theme Preferably printed onto Pellon 50 6 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU May 1989 e sure and stop in and say hi at the Apple Fiesta regional show that s being presented Friday through Sunday June 2 4 in the Safari Hotel Convention Center in Scottsdale Arizona This combined Apple Macintosh desktop publishing user supergroup plus an assembly language programming conference will feature great heaping bunches of name brand Apple people and should have a lot to offer for just about everybody As in previous years I ll be doing some PostScript showing and telling while Bee will have a seminar or two on book on demand publishing and one on high tech opportunities for the working artist Give Jerry Cline a call at AZApple for more details Or else just stop in For those of you in the midwest Tom Weishaar of A2 Central is also putting together a really heavy duty developer conference in Kansas City scheduled for July 21 22 Apple has now finally reworked and rereleased all of the Apple II series tech notes in ProDOS format Do see your local user group or BBS system for copies They re also avail able on disk from A2 Central The high points here include the AppleWorks file formats and details on the Ile production changes that did trash out the game paddle con nec
324. raseRgn B304 GetSysFont 1104 GetColorEntry 4704 GetUserField 7C04 InvertRgn B404 SetVisRgn 1204 SetSCB 4804 SetSysField 7D04 FillRgn B504 GetVisRgn 1304 GetSCB 4904 GetSysField 7E04 ScrollRect SB604 SetIntUse 1404 SetAl11SCBs 4A04 SetRect 7F04 PaintPixels B704 OpenPicture 1504 ClearScreen 4B04 OffsetRect 8104 SubPt B804 PicComment 1604 SetMasterSCB 4C04 InsetRect 8204 SetPt B904 ClosePicture 1704 GetMasterSCB 4D04 SectRect 8304 EqualPt BA04 DrawPicture 1804 OpenPort 4E04 UnionRect 8404 LocalToGlobal BB04 KillPicture 1904 InitPort 4F04 PtInRect 8504 GlobalToLocal BC04 FramePoly 1A04 ClosePort 5004 Pt2Rect 8604 Random BD04 PaintPoly 1B04 SetPort 5104 EqualRect 8704 SetRandSeed BE04 ErasePoly 1C04 GetPort 5204 EmptyRect 8804 GetPixel SBFO4 InvertPoly 1D04 SetPortLoc 5204 NotEmptyRect 8904 ScalePt C004 FillPoly 1E04 GetPortLoc 5304 FrameRect 8A04 MapPoint C104 OpenPoly 1F04 SetPortRect 5404 PaintRect 8B04 MapRect C204 ClosePoly 2004 GetPortRect 5504 EraseRect 8C04 MapRgn C304 KillPoly 2104 SetPortSize 5604 InvertRect 8D04 SetStdProcs C404 OffsetPoly 2204 MovePortTo 5704 FillRect 8E04 SetCursor C504 MapPoly 2304 SetOrigin 5804 FrameOval 8F04 GetCursorAdr C604 SetClipHandle 2404 SetClip 5904 PaintOval 9004 HideCursor C704 GetClipHandle 2504 GetClip 5A04 EraseOval 9104 ShowCursor C804 SetVisHandle
325. red to the original But since you gain 20 1 or more in processing time with your compiling step the final page will print much faster A lot of textfile overhead also tends to disappear during compiling partially offsetting the longer results As a general rule you should try and end up just barely baud rate limited If you are still processing time limited then you should try ad ditional compiling tricks If on the other hand your textfiles ever do in fact end up badly baud rate limiting you then you go back and let your runtime PostScript do more work in exchange for a somewhat shorter file Yes it is a delicate balance One that depends on you on your comm speed the engine and the version of PostScript you are using But know ing and keeping that balance can dramatically speed up all your book on demand printing jobs You might like to use figure five as a timing standard for comparison To demo this properly create four repeating copies into a single textfile Then measure the execution time of the second third and fourth pages Note that each page is being built up from scratch If you return to your host before the last page prints then you will be either PostScript speed limited or are at the wide open engine speed If instead you do not return to the host until after the last page starts feed ing then you are baud rate limited To tell whether you are running at full speed on a NTX set up a repeat
326. reen hexagon on the IIgs screen in an entire semester s work Very simply APW sucks and has to go if the IIgs is to survive We ab solutely must have some new very simple and highly intuitive ways for beginners to generate code that is both useful and rewarding Are you an us or a them Has Apple gilded the goose and killed it in the process Please let me know all your thoughts on this The world awaits your comments Tell me About the IIgs Toolset Interdependencies The key to all of the big machine capabilities of the IIgs are the various tools as contained in the three dozen or so toolkits Several of these are ROM based while others are loaded off disk only when and as needed A tool is used by making a toolbox call Basically what you do is shove some stuff onto your stack load the wide X register with the tool number and the toolkit number and then do a long subroutine call by asking for a JSL El 0000 The tool then does its thing often changing the graphics May 1988 and sound states and usually retur ning a bunch of goodies to you via the stack The stuff shoved onto or off of the stack can be values data or pointers to tables or needed address locations The rules are different for each and every of the hundreds of tools The full details appear in the two volume Apple IIgs Toolbox Reference Man uals which is now at long last avail able in its final form from APDA APW does include some powerfu
327. requires Don Lancaster s step and repeat rubbergrid and curvetracing modules listed elsewhere in these reprints font1 Helvetica BoldOblique findfont 1 5 0 0 1 5 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 Helvetica BoldOblique findfont 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 makefont setfont def font3 Helvetica Oblique findfont 1 0 0 1 0 0 makefont setfont def font4 Helvetica findfont 0 8 0 0 0 8 0 0 makefont setfont def bakercard 0 0 10 setgrid 25 14 showgrid font1 2 10 Tim amp Linda Baker cl font2 1 8 8 tinajas quested cl gsave 2 9 3 m 0 35 setlinewidth 1 setlinecap 13 r gsave font3 2 3 5 629 Quacker Way cl 2 2 5 Alkalai VT 02999 cl 2 1 121 842 9989 cl line2 12 1 m 23 13 lineto stroke 16 1 m 4 35 u gsave 21 5 8 2 m 40 rotate 0 7 O rlineto 0 0 7 rlineto 0 7 0 rlineto closepath fill grestore line1 18 7 6 20 22 4 70 curvetrace stroke 20 1 6 545 249 550 22 5 12 4 130 curvetrace stroke font4 16 5 1 Milton Road cl 21 3 4 Hillside cr 22 7 Quacker cl gsave 15 5 translate 48 rotate 0 0 Woodchuck Highway cl grestore grestore def repeatproc bakercard def businesscard stepandrepeat Fig 5 PostScript code for the personal map cards S 41 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU August 1988 ell as that zookeeper said we have got lots of gnus this month Apple is finally at the kicking and screaming stage of putting the final touches on their new Personal AppleLink network which should
328. roblem The gray letters are also inherently less sharp than are the black ones Or at least I don t know how to correct either of these two features Sorry about that If you have a fix please let me know Possibly a very special spot function can help here A centered point grid is simiarly possible and is handy where layout symmetry is important We ll pick up code on this some other time As per usual this is your column and you can get technical help per the end box Yes we do have reprints of all previous columns available Call or write for further info and for a copy of the new free stuff list regpointgrid Full sheet gray point grid with lower left origin Copyright c 1988 by Don Lancaster amp Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal non commercial use permitted so long as this header remains both present and intact setgrid save rubbersnap exch def size exch def translate size dup scale def drawlines 72 300 div Iw mul size div setlinewidth hposs 0 def hlines gs div 1 add cvi hposs 0 moveto 0 vlines rlineto stroke hposs hposs gs add def repeat vposs 0 def vlines gs div 1 add cvi 0 vposs moveto hlines 0 rlineto stroke vposs vposs gs add def repeat def showgrid seegrid gsave vlines exch def hlines exch def 106 45 pop pop 0 setscreen 0 9 setgray gs 1 def lw 1 def drawlines fat5 gs 5 def Iw 3 def drawlines if
329. s an array of substrings that contains everything that will fit on the line Each substring is in a single font The number of substrings needed per line depends on how fancy you get If you make no font changes and embed no escape commands then only a single substring is produced per line The justification calculations will depend on the selected justify mode On a left justify the substrings are simply printed as is On a center or a right justify the position is suitably shifted per the alignment you want On a fill justify a four step calcu lation is made that decides exactly how much to stretch each space and each character to give you a true fill justify Should hanging punctuation be needed a little extra is added to put the punctuation out into the mar gin just enough that it looks good As a subtle touch the last line in each paragraph is also stretched out slightly so it does not look cramped when compared against the previous lines This stretching is defeated if you already are using more than 90 percent of the available linewidth Everything of course is fully pro grammable and changeable During imaging a compile flag decides whether to print to paper or to return the minimum possible Post Script imaging commands back to the host for recording Compiled code can be astonishingly fast We will see lots more on all this in future columns Please note that the gonzo stuff is copyrighted code on which
330. s how rigid it is how it feels its opacity or even how much a ream of it will weighs Your first goal should be to find a cheap source of plain old Xerox copy paper which will work just fine for everyday uses Out here in Arizona there are warehouse style grocery stores called Price Clubs that will sell you ten reams of excellent copy paper Such as Simpson or Westland for 17 a case or 1 70 per ream How they can do this is a tad of a mystery for their retail price is far below anyone else s large quantity wholesale price This paper is not the whitest and has a slightly greasy look about it It also is not really opaque enough for high quality two sided printing I use plain old offset paper Such as Husky 60 at 3 00 or so per ream for my self published Ask the Guru reprints and all of the other books we custom publish here Offset is a thicker and whiter paper with a better feel and has negligible print through I get paper from a new age outfit called Paper Plus a nationwide self service walk in chain that offers a wide variety of quality papers cheap and in very small quantities I also get specialty papers from them for the laser printing of fluorescent bum perstickers letterhead and stationary materials the blank certificate forms parchment stocks invitation blanks astrobrights covers and label stock If you know of any other chains similar to Paper Plus please let me know so that we can pass thi
331. s they really should More on this in a month or two I m currently using a 57600 baud serial communications channel that goes out the game paddle port of my Ie Because this uses bare metal machine language code the overhead of getting and sending the characters is essentially zero Thus your real baud rate is a true 57600 including the character grabbing times and all overhead and formatting June 1989 We saw one 57600 baud driver two months ago and I ll show you some internal AppleWriter drivers just as soon as I ve completely tested them What about AppleTalk The older versions of AppleTalk often end up considerably slower than plain old honest 9600 baud when transferring short PostScript files Especially on the IIgs but also on those earlier Macintosh machines Again this is S Copyright c 1989 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All commercial rights reserved Personal use is permitted so long as this header remains both present and intact A work in progress disk for Apple Mac Atari or IBM is available for 39 50 Intended for use with my GONZO DL 7 Free printed copies available on request May easily be adapted to any justification program using an unbound awidthshow operator and font names of form fontO font1 font2 etc Gonzo compile routines version 7 0 7 March 89 To use do a persistent download On file to be compiled use
332. s ANO and AN1 low and AN2 and AN3 high The switch input at AN3 is used to avoid any conflicts with the open apple and closed apple keys You also do have the option of hearing the data as it is output This can be handy for debug and speed testing Details on this are different between the IIe and IIgs In general omitting the speaker whapping will turn the sound on on a Ie and off on a IIgs And including that speaker whapping will turn the sound off on a IIe and on on a IIgs This has to do with the IIgs speed byte at C036 un intentionally whapping the speaker on a Ile Arrghhh I chose to use brute force code so that two of the data bits could be a microsecond shorter than the others This was needed for the most precise possible baud rate timing The code is fully equalized and will produce negligible jitter Note that the IIgs is forced into its slow mode during any character output times To use your driver you connect your cable and install the machine language code usually by BLOADing it From machine language you store the character to be output in 0303 and then do a JSR 0300 Your new character will get output so long as the DTR busy line is not low If the busy line is low the driver will wait till DTR goes high before continuing Note that a permanantly low DTR will hang your machine From BASIC you just POKE your character to be sent to 771 and then do a CALL 768 Naturally there is a horrendous speed mism
333. s a streaming tape drive using very low cost media that continuously and permanantly will record any and all traffic Thus any message can be replayed at any time On the LAN of the eighties the operator training is extremely fast and ridiculously simple Even a user in a very high stress environment can master the entire LAN workings in approximately five seconds since the entire system is hardware based Yes even the boss can learn to use it The LAN of the eighties has been thoroughly tested and debugged So much so that the total number of user hours to date exceeds that of all other networking schemes combined Yes this network is so good that it is clearly the LAN of the eighties The eighteen eighties I am of course talking about the Gamewell fire alarm telegraph other wise known as that mangy red box scunging away on the pole down the street Patented over a century ago The call boxes form an amazing electromechanical network that both addressed and solved today s LAN networking problems a century ahead of their time Deja Vu anyone How can I Reconstruct A Blown ProDos Disk The best way of all of course is to never let the disk blow up in the first place Didn t anyone ever tell you about backup copies Or never using an original disk for anything ever Or keeping all your drives clean and at the correct speed Or that car dashboards get warm in the summertime Or never putting a disk anywhere e
334. s by this method At present the 180 page 90 sheet books are produced chapter by chap ter in lots of twenty This limit is set by the LaserWriter s paper tray cap acity The AppleWriter textfiles all reside on four 3 1 2 inch IIgs disks The WPL supervisory language is used to automatically print a single chapter at a time with a high school freshman keeping an eye on the more or less automatic process while she is March 1988 collating or binding Printing is done on a high bulk 5 mil Husky offset paper that is very attractive and resists print through better than copier paper Eventually when the price comes down I will switch to an ultra white custom laser paper Toner cartridges are refilled up to seven times at a cost of less than 7 50 per refill which drops the toner cost under 0 4 cents a page The covers are printed on heavy Skytone parchment and then are run through a Kroy Kolor fusion machine to improve the toner s durability by Bakerizing A wrap around Unibind clear plastic thermal binding is used as an outer cover completely protec ting the cover toner from scuffing or wear A special homemade jig is used to guarantee the covers are square An alternate cover process that I use on my smaller booklets is to laser print and then Kroy Kolor onto an attractive cover stock This is follow ed up by a protective lamination of clear Kroy Laminating Film After the jogging collating and a thermal binding
335. s in Apple s way a plain old Send PS is still conspic uously absent You can however still rearrange IWEM to make it into an acceptable no nonsense PostScript driver for custom uses Also still missing are the crucially needed drivers for Epson and other dot matrix printers for LaserJets and for ink jet printers There are several new tool sets in cluding one for audio compression and expansion These can reduce file sizes by fixed factors of 2 1 or 8 3 The window manager has been greatly improved and includes a new ap note with details on defining your own windows There is also an inch thick bunch of new documentation including full specs for the Sound Tools the Note Synthesizer Audio expander MIDI tools and the Note Sequencer For details on the upgrade see your local Apple dealer or your user S i Make from the toe of a child s athletic sock a rubber band and two heaping teaspoons of pixie dust Fig 1 A pixie dust duster J 44 1 ASK THE GURU Va GONZO JUSTIFY MODULES gonzo dl 2 version 100 4 July 28 1988 Copyright c 1988 by Don Lancaster and SYNERGETICS Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 o 602 428 4073 All commercial rights reserved Personal use permitted so long as this header remains present and intact 39 95 Disks are available for all major computers Seer persist true def persist serverdict begin 0 exitserver if sfix O def cfix 0 def justx ju
336. s machine virtually all of the time Bee has a IIc she actually likes that insidious keyboard driving a LaserWriter Plus with a modem for her personal workstation Software here includes AppleWriter produc tion copy utilities accounting stuff and some weaving goodies Our book on demand production setup is a IIgs once again driving a LaserWriter Plus Sadly that 15 1 per page toner cost penalty on the NTX prohibits us from using it here Instead I am still stuck with one of my ancient 400 000 copy LaserWriter Plus machines At first glance some of this may seem a tad on the wimpy side But note that I can run portions of my PostScript book production routines as much as one hundred times faster than can a novice user running their canned application programs on a Macintosh II For instance a very fancy three column gonzo justified page having two figures a header and a footer needs a mere zero to four seconds of extra page composition time above the NTX full tilt printing speed I very much prefer a computer in which I can understand and freely modify each and every level of hard ware and software in the machine to suit myself Va S Pushbutton announciator and strobe return path Any noise or glitches here can cause damage 4 GAME PADDLE 2 5 VDC SUPPLY _ 2 Expects a 10K to 150K A limited amount of 5vdc variable resistor to 5vdc supply current is available for paddle
337. s name s NeXT machine Thought you would never ask It does clearly show its Lisa and Apple III heritage And it definitely sews up the CD audio pirate who is also a Shakespeare lov ing university professor market There s a lot of similarities here with the Amiga which also was a machine that introduced some new innovations a few weeks ahead of their time that all the others promptly stole and ran with This time the key developments include display Post Script fully professional audio and an erasable and removable CD ROM disk system Fatal flaws currently include the lack of ordinary floppy disk drives lack of color and the market focus that is far too narrow Apple has now released their new LaserWriter Reference Manual In cluded are complete lists of all the 1 On an Apple II IIc Ile or Ilgs get into BASIC SYSTEM and do a CALL 151 to get into the monitor 2 Then enter the following code Diablo and the LaserJet commands secrets of hard disk access interface details the works I do have a few copies in stock here at Synergetics if 0300 4C 07 03 27 0C Al C9 AD lt cr gt 0308 06 03 OA OA OA 4D 06 03 lt cr gt you need one 0310 OA OA 90 03 2C 30 CO 2E lt cr gt Speaking of which we do have 0318 03 03 2E 04 03 2E 05 03 lt cr gt autographed copies of volume I and 0320 2E 06 03 4C 07 03 11 11 lt cr gt volume II of Ask the Guru in stock now as well as volume II of all my Hardware Hacker s
338. s of em this month Xerox has a new high end copier called the Model 50 which has an interesting binding system built in It is apparently based on those old Cheshire heat tape sys tems and their supplies and method should be rather easy to adapt to low end binding needs The only little problem is that the highly touted Xerox customer sales and service simply does not work I have sent them over a dozen calls and letters and all I get back are bunches of the cute little cards asking me to please tell them how impressed I was with their previous non responses S perforated for response scored for folding I a i i I i i i A Response Mailer B Coupon Mailer Fig 2 Two laser printable Die O Perf products S 52 2 ASK THE GURU As before the free Kroy Kolor samples are available through Randy Bailey at Kroy while those low cost substitutes for the pricey Kroy fusion machines are available from Arlin Shepard over at Lazer Products Kroy also has another unique new product called TouchDown This one starts out with your own laser printed transparency and then creates instant transfers in black red blue or green These are tougher than the old 3 M INT materials but not quite as good as die cut vinyl letters More on this when I get a chance to test it out Meanwhile for any of you that want to get in ahead of the hoarders their 2100900 starter kit does list fo
339. s on to interested readers As usual there will be books and or tinaja quests to the providers of the best info The best sources I have found for pressure sensitives are those Wausau Print Paks These are available both coated and uncoated in fluorescents whites and in some special colors January 1988 and finishes The price is around 8 per hundred sheets There are also several specialty papers intended specifically for laser printing that can give you outstan ding results At of course outlandish prices These prices should start to drop as these papers become more in demand and wider known Examples of very high quality laser printing papers include Ham mermill Laser Plus Gilbert Nu Tech and ProTech Laser Bond Those Pro Tech people also have laser printable overhead transparency materials Speaking of which self stick clear acetate or mylar materials can us ually be manually fed Mylar is the better choice since it is more stable and melts at a higher temperature One source is Dick Blick Do not attempt to feed an acetate sheet that does not have a thick paper backing or it is certain to melt and glop up the works Another paper that you definitely do not want to run through your laser printer is that tyvec polypropylene paper as used for some floppy disk holders One minor problem is that the toner falls right off it But that s completely academic since the heat fusion rollers will convert this p
340. s program Above all I do want to be able to import the full AppleWriter quality mixed font fill justified typography into Illustrator I want a gonzo justify routine that is fully programmable I want to be able to define or redefine any com mand and even the entire set at any time for any reason instantly switch ing into or out of full PostScript I also want a full macro capability that lets me use a single keystroke or a single embedded character to do such things as change from a centered bold lowered non indented title into a fill justified a standard and para graph indented main text Naturally I want to be able to use any mix of any size fonts on any particular line including of course the ability to have fonts fatter than they are wide and vice versa I want fonts on above and below the base line and I want to lean them any amount in either direction Fractional font sizes are a must I want a four stage progressive fill microjustification First I want to add a definable minimum amount of kerning between each and every in dividual character This is extremely important for 300 DPI printing in the 9 to 12 point range yet nobody seems to offer it On stage two I want to spread the spaces out some only to a visually October 1988 acceptable and attractive limit On stage three I want to further spread the individual characters out again to a visually acceptable limit Finally if the first
341. s reserved Personal non commercial use permitted so long as this header remains present and intact The Latest work in progress disk costs 39 50 This is intended as an add on for version 6 0 or higher of my gonzo justify code but it can be adapted to other layout or formatting code ctab justify will take most any input file and convert it into a proportionally spaced table The only current rule is that double spaces are prohibited in any entry and that at least two spaces are needed between successive columns of the input file tab list dictionary entries are xoffset justification fontnumber txtwide The width is always required but is normally only used with fill justify It must be larger than any left justified string unless you purposely want multiple line entries tablist 100 dict def tablist begin 0 O cl 1 1000 def 1 70 cc 1 1000 def 2 150 cf 1 80 def 3 250 cr 1 1000 def 4 250 cl 1 1000 def 5 300 cl 1 1000 def 6 350 cl 1 1000 def 7 400 cl 1 1000 def 8 450 cl 1 1000 def 9 500 cl 1 1000 def end tabstring def this is the searching tab marker two spaces settabstring save snapct exch def justifylastparline true def tablist cvs get aload pop txtwide exch def 0 get changefont exch xleft add ypos 4 2 roll cvx exec clear snapct restore unrestorefont def tabnum gottatab exch pop exch smsg e
342. s two changes in 4 34 microseconds Each one of all the RS422 inputs and outputs of all of the parties on the line are literally tied together all of the time Only one talker is allow ed to be active at any given time as determined by the AppleTalk firm ware and software at each machine The circuit is fundamentally a 1 1 isolation transformer which has an operating impedance around 37 5 ohms The 37 5 ohms comes about since you are often driving a pair of 75 ohm cables in parallel A 100 ohm terminating resistor will get automatically switched in if this node is at the end of the cable 100 Ohms is used instead of 75 since it is close enough but will load the drivers a lot less The transformer shield is connec ted to ground by way of an R C high frequency bypass network so that hum and low frequency noise cannot common mode modulate the shield The specs for the genuine trans former are also shown in figure one but I suspect most any old small 1 1 matching transformer may work o k We will see some details on some sneaky AppleTalk substitutes in next month s column How do I Read the Apple Keys from BASIC I was suprised to get this helpline call because just about everybody knows the answer to this one It also appears in just about any Apple book particularly in the Ze Technical Ref erence Manual and the Ic Technical Reference Manual These are both available through APDA or at better bookstores But
343. sc 4 Change to font4 Preferred use all caps normal body text esc 5 Change to font5 Preferred use all caps italic body text esc 6 Change to font6 Preferred use all caps bold body text esc 7 Change to font7 Preferred use bold and dropped headers esc 8 Change to font8 Preferred use subscripts esc 9 Change to font9 Preferred use superscripts esc Change to font Preferred use Zapf Dingbats esc Change to font Preferred use Symbol in body text size esc C Change to center justification on xpos txtwide 2 esc F Change to fill justification between xpos and xpos txtwide esc L Change to left justification starting at xpos esc R Change to right justification ending at xpos txtwide esc a Perform user defined Macro amacro esc b Perform user defined Macro bmacro esc c Perform user defined Macro cmacro esc d Perform user defined Macro dmacro esc e Perform user defined Macro emacro esc f Perform user defined Macro fmacro esc g Start gonzo justification A PostScript alias for startgonzo esc h Do a half of a negative linefeed esc i Doan initial drop capital esc 1 Do a full linefeed esc n Nobreak conditional formfeed if within six lines of ybot esc p Switch to normal paragraph margin starting with next line esc s Do ashowpage for end of scanned file only esc x Exit gonzo justify and switch to native PostScript esc y Do a yinc up full negative lin
344. self Which is as good a way as any to sneak us into the usual advetorials The bound sets of my Ask the Guru reprints remain available Also to find out how I make money so is my classic Incredible Secret Money Ma chine how to book Plus the usual reminders that my hardware column is found over in Radio Electronics be sure and catch all the hacker superconductor stuff and that we have this great Postscript BBS going at 409 244 4704 Onward and upward What is so Special About An AppleTalk Cable I have sort of been wondering that myself Inside that funny little box is a fifty cent transformer a penny re sistor and a few cents worth of wire And little more Figure one shows you the schem atic an AppleTalk cable drop At either end AppleTalk will plug into a standard RS422 serial connec tor This can be either an older DB9 connector or else a newer mini DIN 8 All that goes over the interface is a train of pulses at a base frequency of 230 4 kilobaud The pulse period is 4 34 microseconds AS we ve seen in previous issues your basic bare metal AppleTalk communication rate is at least in theory around 25 times faster than using 9600 baud But much of the AppleTalk soft ware is so slow and so cumbersome that it sometimes may gobble up all of this potential 25 1 speed advantage and then some A digital one is defined as one transition per each 4 34 microsec onds while a digital zero is defined a
345. ser technical services Expect a direct tech help hotline soon along with much wider and easier AppleLink BBS access plus several new user group services Now if we could only get them to loosen up on their repair and service information we might actually end up with something workable Apple also provides a new and free Connections guide a handy resource directory for disabled children and adults This is available through their special education office At the same time Apple has now improved their AppleTalk connec tors so they do not fall apart quite so easily Naturally they substantially upped the price when they did this What they really need to do with AppleTalk of course is make it so it inherently works with either doorbell wire or telephone twisted pair They should also get rid of all of that ridiculous AppleTalk software over head that makes plain old honest 9600 baud serial communications sig nificantly faster for many users much of the time Rumors are surfacing of an Apple developed genlock video board that plugs into a Ile or a IIgs and pro vides an overlay of IIgs graphics onto an external true NTSC video signal Apparently the board is powerful enough that it can provide full Igs graphics even when plugged into a Ie that has not been upgraded More on this as the drama unfolds I have felt for years that the first and foremost decision that should be made when designing a new personal com
346. setgrid 35 57 showgrid 0 35 5 57 57 1 75 0 8 quickboxpath gsave stroke grestore gsave bestgray lightgray 0 65 setlinewidth stroke grestore newpath font1 NewCenturySchlbk Boldlitalic findfont 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 NewCenturySchlbk Boldltalic findfont 1 6 0 0 1 6 0 0 makefont setfont def font3 NewCenturySchlbk Boldltalic findfont 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 makefont setfont def font4 ZapfDingbats findfont 7 0 0 5 0 0 makefont setfont def gsave bestgray 0 8 setgray 1 setlinecap 7 6 50 1 mt line2 17 3 8 55 4 translate 70 rotate 0 0 0334 cl grestore 3 53 0332a note from cl 10 50 5 0331Yodar Kritch cl 17 7 1 5 0333 602 428 4073 cc def twonote stepandrepeat Fig 5 PostScript code for the two up notepad S 51 5 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU June 1989 pple has corrected many of the really bad bugs in their ImageWriter LQ printer Especially those involving the poor printing at the top and the bottom of the page and some of the severe noise problems They are even offering a free exchange for any of you that previously bought the older model This is as close to a total pro duct recall as Apple has ever come Word has it that the long delayed IIgs upgrade is due real soon now More on this when and where I can tell you all about it A and inCider magazines seem to have merged with continuity ending up on the inCider side What this means is that the thir
347. sk The Guru HP s attitude towards service and repair parts are light years ahead of the black hole policy at Apple and the more knowledgeable LaserWriter users end up using LaserJet manuals and HP repair parts available via VISA and an 800 number overnight to anyone anytime The applicable older CX manual goes by HP part number 02686 90904 while their newer SX manual is 33440 90904 There are half a dozen reasonable routes to salvaging your LaserJet investment that would seem more productive than staking your nearest HP salesman to an anthill One is to snap on an intelligent and genuine PostScript speaking lid The QMS people offer several PS Jet lids that give you full PostScript capabilities Unfortunately these lids can cost considerably more than your LaserJet and the combined price can end up rather on the high side Weitek now provides some super 5V 150K X axis 150K Y axis ground gt shown as female DB 9 socket on rear panel 4700 left right button Fig 2 Circuit for the new Apple Game Paddles or Joystick J 46 2 ASK THE GURU duper custom RISC computer chips to several manufacturers who are now offering all sorts of new LaserJet lid options as well as real PostScript raster image processors that will plug directly into various personal com puters Contact Weitek directly for a current list of retail suppliers Some of the
348. slowed down the next several pages until the cache can recover By going to some post processing scanmap and bitmap techniques the imaging time was changed from over ninety minutes to under two seconds a speedup of 2700 1 with a zero need for any actual font imaging At any rate figure three shows you some PostScript utilities that get you from a string or other proc to either a scanmap or a bitmap I prefer the scanmaps What these do is give you a list of where along each scan line to start and end an in dividual line of pixels These can be related to a compression technique known as run length encoding that can often end up considerably more compact than real bitmaps There are two possible scanmap directions A vertical scan map will give you vertical pixel bars These are useful for perspective and 3 D lettering A horizontal scanmap will give you horizontal pixel bars handy for star wars images Figure three does show you several utilities that create the vertical and horizontal scan maps image these scan maps convert them over into bitmaps and return the bitmaps or scanmaps to your host for further capture and processing There is one very big gotcha The February 1989 reportvlinemap routine will not work on certain newer PostScript printers It is intended specifically for use with the old LaserWriter and Las erWriter Plus having version 38 or earlier software A bug seems to have worked its way i
349. sounds sort of like those old hot dog cookers that directly electrocuted several hot dogs at once 42 5 by connecting them across the ac power line Sure enough they got hot when you tried this Totally inedible but hot They also both burned your tongue and left a bad taste in your mouth What is Post Justification Editing It is probably the simpliest and most elegant way of dramatically upping the print quality of virtually any and all desktop publishing work Post justification editing is also ex tremely controversial since it kicks sand in the face of just about all of them at once Its only little advantage is that it does work like a champ But nobody believes it until they try it After that they cannot live without it Anything you can possibly do to up the quality of any low resolution printing can help dramatically And conversely anything that you do not do is sure to return to haunt you We ve seen in the past how nearly everybody always insists on using the seventeenth lousiest gray with Post Script and how this can be fixed with a few keystrokes Hint 106 45 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen Or try a 135 25 Or 95 25 Or even 85 35 But never that putrid stock 53 45 Urp We have also seen how you can dramatically improve the legibility and appearance of typography as small as 3 points at 300 DPI through a individual pixel by pixel step and lock technique
350. space observer fe 20 Gee sale Be ah te ol _ _yo zz Zo yo yy zo zo zo yo yy ground level Fig 5 The 2 point perspective X and Y transforms N J One additional source for those LocalTalk connectors are the AESP people MDIdeas has some true stereo sound add ons for the IIgs SCRG sells adaptors that let you use an Apple Joystick with a I along with similar goodies Color laser toner is available from either Michelin or Toner Technology But I have been most disappointed with any and all color toners that I have tried to date They look awful and the pricing is outrageous Kroy Kolor is often a better choice The recommended RAM expansion chips for the IIgs are the 256K bit dynamic parts organized as 256K x 1 with CAS before RAS refresh and a speed of 150 nanoseconds If you must use LocalTalk with the LaserWriter on the IIgs it is ridicu lously faster not to be sure to use the launcher after the chooser and be sure you can print to slot seven Any reset or power down will disconnect the LocalTalk firmware Two of the many products that convert PFS files to Appleworks are available from Jim Luther and from Sun Microsystems Any New Hi tech Toys It is a cross between an ant farm and an hourglass and consists of Va Fig 4 Adding a filling hole to a CX toner cartridge N 38 3 nothing but some air some colored water and two shaded sands of dif fering densit
351. sses A properly fused toner image does make an excellent etch resist The problem is to get the toner from the laser printer drum onto the solid printed circuit board material reliably and without any distortion Let me know if you have a good solution to this for there is a very immediate and very large market for the direct toner based printed circuit etching Particularly for prototypes and short runs Virtually all printed circuit production products to date are either high end or useless trash This one would solve a lot of big problems for a lot of people What is This Month s PostScript Utility Just an automatic and intelligent border machine that s all Unlike any other way of doing borders you simply tell the routine where you want the border and how high and how wide to make it You also tell it approximately how thick you want the border to be The routine does the rest automatically figuring out how many lumps are needed vertically and horizontally and then automatic ally giving you perfect corners and alignment for each and every lump Figure three does show you all the PostScript code involved You first define three PostScript procedures for a mainproc an auxproc and for a cornerproc along with their sizes The only major restriction is that mainproc is supposed to be exactly one unit wide The border elements are laid down in an unusual sequence that sim plifies your artwork tremendously
352. stF def justification left f full etc endtheline closeline lastparline pop pop startnewline ifelse def closeline fontsave fontn 4 get def printsubstrings fontsave changefont ypos ypos yinc sub def colcheck def swallowandhang removes any trailing spaces from the line where they would interfere with fill and right justify It then optionally hangs the punctuation as needed hangflag true def str def hanglist 261 320 def hangfract 0 67 def reallyhang hanglist hangchar eq str 0 hangchar put str stringwidth pop hangfract mul sparechange exch add sparechange exch def exit if forall def hangpunct dup dup hangchar exch def 97 It exch 122 gt or reallyhang if exit def swallowandhang lastchar 1 sub 1 0 linestring exch get dup 32 eq pop spaces spaces 1 sub def chars chars 1 sub def sparechange sparechange spacewidth add def hangpunct ifelse for def justF swallowandhang spaces dup 0 gt lastparline sparechange txtwide 0 10 mul ge sfix maxsstretch 0 40 mul def sfix 0 def ifelse cfix 0 def sparechange exch div scfix exch def xpos1 scfix dup maxsstretch It sfix exch def cfix 0 def pop maxsstretch sfix exch def scfix maxsstretch sub spaces mul chars 1 sub div dup maxcstretch It cfix exch def maxcstretch dup cfix exch def sub chars 1 sub mul spaces div sfix add sfix exch def ifelse sifelse ifelse pop sfix 0 def cfix 0 def ifelse endtheline def justL sf
353. stScript Should you ever actually want to get a printed listing of your PostScript code just temporarily add the command image Writer to the start of your file To convert the stock IWEM AppleTalk imagewriter emulator into a program that will send PostScript code to the Laserwriter 1 Make a backup copy of your Ilgs system master v2 0 disk Label this disk as modified for direct PostScript use Rename APPLETALK IWEM as APPLETALK IWEM ORIG Load APPLETALK IWEM ORIG into AppleWriter Rename the PostScript procedure _WDJ_ as imagewriter a fF OO N When the modified emulator is installed PostScript code can be directly sent over AppleTalk via the usual PR 7 or PD7 methods To print the PostScript file rather than executing it simply prefix the entire file with the imagewriter command Fig 2 Converting IWEM to a SEND PS clone Immediately following the above routine define an empty procedure as _ WDJ_ def 6 Save the file as APPLETALK IWEM S 35 2 ASK THE GURU a N RXD 8 RXD 8 RXD 8 TXD 4 SO na MO ao 6 GND 1 _ GND GND TXD G5 TXD TXD OK RXD RX Ta RXD Ea DB9 DB9 MiniDIN 8 DB9 MiniDIN8 MiniDin 8 male male male male male male N Fig 3 NULL modem cables for use as AppleTalk substitutes J Instead of executing the code it will simply get printed in the emulation mode Sneaky huh
354. statusdict manualfeed true put def start manual feed negative 1 sub abs settransfer def positive settransfer def notestpage serverdict begin 0 exitserver statusdict begin false setdostartpage end end quit def cancel test page outline false charpath def finds character outline path persist serverdict begin 0 exitserver def starts persistent download pi 3 1415926 def you wanted rhubarb instead printfonts Helvetica findfont 10 0 0 10 0 0 makefont setfont xpos 150 def ypos 600 def yinc 12 def xpos 20 sub ypos 20 add moveto CURRENTLY INSTALLED FONTS show FontDirectory pop 100 string cvs xpos ypos moveto show show ypos ypos 12 sub def forall showpage def fonts to page putridgray 53 45 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen def stock screen random rand 65536 div 32768 div mul cvi def as in 6 random for 0 5 result report flush 100 37 sin pop repeat def top of stack to host reprogray 85 35 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen def 85 line reportimer mytime 1000 div rElapsed time print 20 string cvs print seconds r print flush def to host resettimer mytime 0 def def reset timer snoop 1183615869 internaldict begin def activates superexec stall 37 sin pop repeat def delay as in 1500 stall starttimer usertime mytimenow exch def add to time so far stoptimer usertime mytimenow sub mytime exch mytime add def
355. stores law offices etc While a tad heavy on the real estate and accounting entries this is a must have book va DB9 1K The transformer is wound on a Siemens B65651 K000 R030 with a B65652 triple bobbin and a B65653 retaining clip There are two primary windings of 35 turns each and a single secondary winding of 70 turns All windings are 32 wire The transformer must have a magnetizing inductance of 20 milli henries minimum Leakage inductance is 15 microhenries maximum The 100 ohm terminating resistor is switched into the circuit if either of the AppleTalk jacks are unconnected 1 Megohm Fig 1 Schematic of a stock AppleTalk connector N AppleTalk jacks 100 34 1 Postscript dipdraw Reading Apple keys Black vs white write Printing onto anything An AppleTalk schematic They also have a new Beginner s Luck video with an optional 7 price tag There are coupons for this tape in many major magazines There s a third party outfit named MENU that has a pair of fine free directories called the Apple IT Guide and the MAC Guide Their intent is to direct mail sell you any and all of the listed software While quite useful there are two grevious flaws here they do not list the names addresses or helplines of all the original software houses and I suspect they list only what they feel like stocking I m getting these wierd calls lately over people who are
356. t 10 sub def xpos bl 6 add def yinc 8 def amacro hy stringmacro def emacro yparendadj yinc 2 div def def def normallisting bc br bl sub 2 div bl add def txtwide bw 10 sub def ybot 99999 def font0 Helvetica Bold findfont 12 0 0 12 0 0 makefont setfont def font1 Helvetica findfont 8 5 0 0 8 5 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 Helvetica Oblique findfont 8 5 0 0 8 5 0 0 makefont setfont def font3 Helvetica Bold findfont 8 5 0 0 8 5 0 0 makefont setfont def font4 Courier findfont 8 5 0 0 8 5 0 0 makefont setfont def ypos bt 20 sub def xpos bl 20 add def yinc 10 def pmnorm 60 def amacro Lhy stringmacro def bmacro 1py stringmacro def cmacro 3z stringmacro def def showfigborder true def showfigtitle true def yfigadj 0 def figparams blw 0 5 def brad 0 01 def bh figheight yfigadj cvi yinc cvi mod add yinc div floor yinc mul def bt bb bh add yinc 0 2 mul sub def bb bt bh sub 5 sub def ifelse boxpath showfigborder stroke if showfigtitle save tsnap4 exch def txtwide bw def 55 changefont bl bb yinc 1 25 mul sub title cf clear tsnap4 restore if def uppershift bh yfigadj add yinc div ceiling yinc mul sub yinc sub def figure tll bl leftmargin 1 add def bw txtwide def bb collimits 1 get yfigadj add def true figparams collimits dup 1 get bh add yfigadj add 1 exch put yfigadj 0 def def figure1lc bl leftmargin txtwide add 1 add def bb collimits 3 get yfiga
357. t even remotely in the same league as the red and blue books It is also a April 1989 030C 030E AD 0314 129 0317 O31A 0311 0315 031D 0320 10 2c 48 8D AD 2c 48 cycles 0321 0322 0323 3 BO 22 0324A 032C 032E 032F 0332 5 0334 0325 0327 0336 0337 0339 033B 033E EA 2C 0344 0346 EA 0340 0341 0347 0348 0349 034B 034D BO EA 2C 0356 EA 03597 0350 0352 0353 0358 0354 035B 035D O35F BO EA S2C 0368 0364A 036B 0362 0364 0365 036C 036D 036F 32C BO 0376 EA 0379 O37C O37E 0371 0374 0378 0380 0381 BO 2C BO O38A 038B 038E EA EA 0383 0385 0388 0390 0391 0392 0393 BO 22C O39A 039C 039D 03A0 0342 0343 EA EA 03A6 O3A9 O3AA O3AD O3AE 0395 0397 03A4 03A5 68 6A 90 BO BO EA 2c 90 90 6A 90 BO 2c BO 90 EA 6A 90 BO 2c 90 EA 6A 90 BO 2c 90 EA EA 6A 90 BO BO 2c 90 90 6A 90 EA 2c 90 6A 90 BO EA 2c 90 48 68 2c 68 8D 28 60 FB 30 36 TE 36 03 59 09 00 58 00 08 59 00 00 07 00 58 06 59 00 07 00 58 06 59 00 07 00 58 06 59 00 09 00 58 00 08 59 00 00 07 00 58 06 59 00 07 00 58 06 59 00 58 36 SUCCESSFUL 0309 co co co 03 co 032E 0327 co 032C 0336 co 0334
358. t the RAM chip prices are dropping dramatically and the RAM shortage is ending They also introduced a pricey Mac IIx with wonder of wonders firmware in a SIMM plug in module This miracu Apple game paddle circuits Book publishing on demand PostScript intelligent directory The GOCCO silk screen process LaserJet to LaserWriter conversion lously can let you flush QuickDraw and replace it with a third party Display PostScript Whoopee There are two new Apple related publications out One is REBOOT It certainly gets the record for the northernmost Apple newsletter since any further north from Unalakleet would be south This is very read able particularly for novice users II Technical is a new magazine for all of you intermediate to advanced Appleholics Free samples are now available Contact Brian Fitzgerald or Greg Autry for your personal copy Adobe Systems is having a big sale on their high quality downloadable PostScript fonts Buy a font for only 32 and get a 45 Megabyte hard disk thrown in free Its called the Adobe Type Folio and the only tiny gotcha is that you have to buy all 300 fonts at the same time It still is a real bargain for high end NTX owners that want a complete set of the finest available typography Adobe also has a free Font and Function printed listing and a free Adobe Type Stack Mac Hypercard disk available Did you hear the one about IBM making a minor change to one page
359. tartUp start the memory manager _MTStartUp start the misc tools lda 23 begin memory manager pha lda 00 initializes event pha k lda 00 queue pha i lda SON mouseclamp pha i lda 00 i pha i lda 00 H pha i lda MYID z user i d again pha i _EMStartup i MDROP libraries ainclude ml6 locator MLOAD libraries ainclude m16 quickdraw lda 20 start quickdraw pha i lda 80 master SCB pha i lda 00 use full screen pha i lda MYID and current i d pha 7 _ODStartUp and make the call lda 00 set the color table to zero pha i pea ctab0 16 high address of color table pea ctab0 low address of color table _SetColorTable 3 lda 80 set screen control bytes pha X _SetAllSCBs for all 640 resolution GrafOn turn on super HIRES screen lda 5555 clear the screen to red pha _ClearScreen Hang JML Hang hang for viewing MYID DC POF user ID goes in here ctabO dc I2 S 0000 S000f Off0 SOfff standard color table dc I2 0000 0f00 00f0 S0ffE dc 12 S 0000 S000f SO0ff0 SOfffL dc 12 0000 0f00 S00f0 SO0fff END Fig 2 APW example shows how to start up toolsets S 39 2 ASK THE GURU Ne a Copyright c 1988 by Don Lancaster amp Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal non commercial use permitted so long as this header remains both present and intact Work in Progress disk costs 39 50 prede
360. ted in a bare minimum of 5000 sheets or so Their pricing is usually one third to one fifth of any retail source Here are two tips involving trans parent materials If you place a sheet of one mil mylar in contact with a paper and toner image and then run it back through the printer while hand feeding a blank copy that toner im age will Bakerize and convert the toner into a much more durable blacker and glossy image This is particularly useful for business cards but gets overwhelming in any larger text blocks It is utterly trivial to print back wards on a PostScript printer Just use the 6 2 0 translate 1 1 scale command This lets you put all your self stick transparent decals on the inside of a window or a glass door where they will be considerably more weather and vandal resistant By the way I would very much like to find a transparent material that has all of the following magic properties It would be dimensionally stable at high temperatures It would also reliably but only loosely hold toner What you would do with it is copy a 1 1 printed circuit pattern onto it and then use this to transfer the toner directly to a printed circuit board for etching The toner would serve as the actual etch resist This would greatly simplify the printed circuit production process especially for students and hackers So far some of the materials I have tried have failed miserably while there have been a few near mi
361. tempt this The medium thickness work best Using an SX engine is recommended over the CX one because of its straight paper path While the final toner image is not outstanding it is certainly clear and quite legible Why bother Well simply because Fig 4 The ultimate bagel S 50 5 ASK THE GURU simply because Pellon makes a very good universal pattern and transfer material It s much more durable than paper You can also dye it color it wrap it in cloth embroider it dip it or paint it In a few minutes my beginning PostScript class came up with over a hundred off the wall uses for Pellon transfers Included were such things as the storyboard objects for child or church show and tell sessions stick ons quilt patterns a giant stencil enlarged Zapf dingbats display signs art teaching aides big pillows with names on them interior decorating gee gaws and bunches more Ferinstance Say you wanted some big pillows having the words LEXIE or CASSIE on them You could start start off with 400 point Helvetica bold and print all of the individual letters onto Pellon Those Pellon letters are then cut out and traced onto a somewhat puffy foam backed felt material of the type that does not have to be turned under or hemmed This unusual material in a contrasting color to the main pillow material then gets zig zag sewn or appliqued in place Obviously Bee wrote the previous
362. the key code involved is shown in figure eight Write or call for a printed listing of all the core routines You can also get this code ready to run in either my PostScript Show and Tell or my PostScript Per spective Drawing packages Note particularly that each and every brick is shown individually in its true perspective that all of the lettering is also correctly shown in full and true perspective and that the entire building can be rotated over a very wide range just by changing a few keystrokes Yes as the building rotates all of the insets and outsets will auto matically take care of showing only those parts that will be seen correctly for that view And yes I do have lots more per spective images like this one Also a few that include circles arches and even arcs in true perspective Even some fireplace logs Write or call if you need more info As a second contest that pretty near anyone can enter just count the bricks used in the building We ll have all the usual stuff as prizes Don t forget to put the cat out April 1988 Copyright c 1988 by Don Lancaster amp Synergetics Box 809 Thatcher AZ 85552 602 428 4073 All rights reserved Personal use permitted so long as this header remains present and intact This illustration requires my two point perspective utilities 90 rotate 792 0 translate 250 550 translate 0 setlinewidth xo 00 def yo 700 def zo 400 def objrot 25 de
363. the obvious PostScript is a general purpose computer language from the Adobe Systems people that excels at doing combined graphics and text page descriptions for laser printers and high resolution phototypesetters You normally do not have to go out and buy PostScript Instead it is built into and included free with such laser printers as the Apple LaserWriter Plus the QMS PC 800 and the new high end AST machines PostScript is also available at extra cost on the Allied Linotron version 100 and 300 phototypesetters But note particularly that none of the current Hewlett Packard Laser Jets can speak PostScript until after a quite expensive third party lid is attached to it Now H P may say they aggresively support PostScript but their current crop of laser printers most certainly do not You must have a PostScript speak ing printer to be able to make use of PostScript As far as I know nobody has yet written a good PostScript interpreter for a daisywheel or a dot matrix printer although it certainly would be possible While PostScript has been placed in the public domain the actual implementation for any particular printer definitely is not Thus while you are free to write all your own PostScript code clone the interpreter source code for any existing machine is highly proprietary To a manufacturer the only real difference between a PostScript and a non PostScript printer is a tad extra memory and a small licens
364. the slightest idea what the product is or what it can really do Meanwhile there is a rather ugly and major compatibility bug between the Hypercard and the Multifinder All of the unrealized potential here seems to be on the awesome side of horendous though One thing that really galls me is that Apple has been witholding the Send PS routine for the IIgs while at the same time being downright rude to people using their LaserWriters on a PC or an Atari let alone on a Ile or IIgs Apparently they are still labor ing under the grave delusion that a Macintosh that s using AppleTalk is in some manner either useful or even desirable when you re doing desktop publishing In the real world the Macintosh and AppleTalk route to laser printing is both slow and expensive There can be very compelling advantages to using other host machines making a direct serial LaserWriter connection Particularly if you already happen to own the host Or you simply feel strongly about using another brand of personal computer Reports are also streaming in that some older software will not run on the new ROM chips for the IIgs P1 keep you posted once we get a more complete list Hacker II and Bard s Tale and are two problem programs On the positive side Apple does now have a new and a free Vertical Markets Business Directory out This one lists all the software of interest to weavers cotton farmers for church congregations video rental
365. them There are no machine language listings for any relocatable big ma chine code Only a highly complex file structure is present A structure that is quite hard to either list or understand unless worked with from inside APW itself What in effect has happened is that a IIgs fence has been built with users on one side and the programmers on the other And that fence is very hard to climb Impossible for some This of course is the exact anti thesis of what made the Apple II and I so great anyone could stumble into anything And they did That is precisely what made the Apple such a stupendously innovative product in the first place Now I will freely admit that the IIgs us versus them fence is not nearly as horrendous as the one on the Mac On the Mac their fence is now electrified strafed and contin uously patrolled by AIDS infected pit bulls Mean mothers It appears that far and away the best IIgs code will be written the old way with custom and hand crafted fixed position listable code modules that either will completely ignore the toolbox or else use only the genuine ly useful parts of acceptable speeds The centralmost fatal flaw in the IIgs is the monumental amount of frustration that is involved in serious program development I have seen rank beginners generate absolutely outstanding machine language code on the I or Ile On the IIgs two of my best students ever were unable to produce a g
366. then further processed If a substitution character then the needed code substitution is made For instance you might like to use a in your host instead of embedding escape commands if your host does prohibit you from embedding any control commands into a PostScript or other textfile If a reverse slash the next few August 1988 characters get tested per the rules in figure five and all the needed com mands or characters are substituted into the line string Finally if an end of scan command the scanner will kick out and drop you back into PostScript Scanning also ends automatically at the end of the file Two loops are involved The inner loop builds a single text line on a character by character basis The outer loop keeps building text lines so long as any additional characters remain or until an end of scan com mand gets received Our upcoming new gonzo justify routines will make extensive use of this input scanner so we ll be seeing lots more on this code Any input text scanner will of course slow you down This par ticular one has been optimized for speed in several ways but still stands some improvement Ideally when you finalize all of your PostScript code you should combine input text scanning with some other tasks In particular it is unforgivable to have to scan each and every character two or more times Many more details on all this text scanning code as well as ready to run versi
367. ther than over stock serial Certain older version LaserWriter firmware will also cause the readline command to work just fine serially but fail when used over AppleTalk The sledgehammer workarounds to this involve never using the readline command or else writing your own input scanner that will automatically convert carriage returns into newline linefeeds This introduces a modest speed penalty into the worst possible place in your code The fix to the older copies of my gonzo input scanner is dup 13 eq 3 sub if just before all of the linefeed processing takes place Where are all the Secret Toner Reloading Tools Since there s two brand new toner cartridge reloading tools available this month I thought it might be a good time to review all of the secret reloading tools and insider sources But first the new stuff A great SX cartridge pin puller is now available from Thompson and Thompson as their model AXP43 007 09R Glompen Stractor This one neatly and cleanly pulls the pins with zero damage The older techniques used here included traverse cutting pliers screw extrac tors woodworker screw starters or an obscure craftsman tool known as a 8 gimlet The really big news though is that it looks like SX drum hard recoating is now a reality In theory this can greatly extend the SX cartridge life and might eventually reduce or even eliminate the 15 1 per page toner cost penalty of the LaserJet II or either the
368. tica Bold findfont 1 2 0 0 1 0 0 makefont setfont stretch 0 def gsave numpins 2 div 1 sub 2 div howhigh 2 div 0 33 sub translate chipname dup callout exch def stretchprint grestore end cleanup grestore grestore clear snap restore def Dipdraw demo remove before use 150 200 translate 25 dup scale 0 0 moveto 14 ULN 2429 OUT 12V DC C2 C2 DIN OSR OUT NC GND GND C1 OSC C1 dipdraw showpage Fig 4 My Postscript dipdraw routine S 34 4 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU January 1988 pple has just released a very powerful new BASIC that you can use on your IIgs Yes it does access all of the resources of the IIgs including the full memory and all of the new toolbox Yes it includes a printusing Yes it allows long variable names and labeled goto and gosub calls No it is not a Microsoft product It seems to be a latter day channeled reincarnation of that Apple Business Basic long ago used on the Apple III Cost is 50 and it is now available directly from A P D A Seperate licensing of a runtime module is available so that users of your custom software do not have to buy the program themselves Some negative points include total incompatibility with all the existing Applesloth programs the inability to run under older ProDOS or DOS 3 3 rather slow booting and the lack of any downward compatibility as need ed to run on anything but the IIgs Apple has now announced vers
369. tion marks plenty of BRK zeros and oddball code used in strange ways Next go through only the working code areas and paint each RTS green The RTS command forms both the Achille s Heel and the Rosetta Stone to cracking anything Then you paint these subroutine calls orange noting that there are in code calls out of code calls and finally and most im portantly calls to monitor locations and other fixed and known Apple re sources Create a cross reference list as you go along Your branches next go down in blue using vertical and horizontal for upward going loops and diagonals for downward going breakouts and any bypasses Your jumps and indirect jumps are then done in pink At this point you temporarily set aside the working code and see what you can find out about the related files First seperate the files by their vibes seperating stuff that looks like it belongs together from any right angle turns in the bytes that seem to be popping up You then try to identify what a file is and what it contains First and foremost are the ASCII text listings which will have lots of 20 spaces with plenty of 4X and 5X charac ters between them You will note all similar patterns for lower case and high ASCII as well Other types of files that are easy to identify include the lists of addresses shape tables DOS and ProDOS com mand tables and similar goodies You then go back into your most popular subroutines and s
370. tly destroy several drives and the IIgs motherboard Note also that yes you can freely plug printer cables in and out any time you like But if you ever try connecting or disconnecting a disk drive on a IIgs with the power on you are virtually certain to destroy either or both the drive or the IIgs motherboard Do NOT ever add or remove any drive when IIgs power is applied IITTI Cae fc com A 2 p 11 00 IN ji Sh a y ZZ fp X anur i ried UE E Wal a ai As eZ ii 40 3 Remember finally that there is a rundown time on your IIgs power supply Always wait a minimum of 40 seconds after turning the power off before you even think about changing any card or cable One commercial source of these adaptors is Redmond Cable Show me a List of The Main IIgs Tools One of the best ways to learn to use the tools in the IIgs toolkit is to tear apart the working code of others to see just how it is done A toolbox call is made by shoving things onto the stack loading the X register with a two hex digit high value for the tool and a two hex digit low value for the toolset A JSL E10000 is then done to activate the tool The tool in turn does its thing makes some changes and returns some pointers and results back to the stack for future use I have never found a really good backwards list of all the IIgs tools arranged in numeric order by call so figure two gives you the start
371. to be at the center of the color proofing universe They also can do decals and metal foils What they do when you write or call is send you a big packet of absolutely beautiful and mind blowing samples along with some utterly confusing and totally undecipherable ads Then for a mere 5000 extra they offer to send you a salesman who will explain the incredibly confusing ad materials to you There are also at least two mystery processes called Chromatec and Mat roColor that I now know absolutely nothing about And I suspect there are at least a dozen more And in the weaving stores of all places are shelves of little colored photo emulsion bottles that you can use to stick LaserWriter images onto nearly anything Obviously there are great heaping bunches of off the wall opportunities here that are going begging 44 2 So let s make a contest out of it Tell me everything you know about any color proofing system There will be several Incredible Secret Money Machine books for just about any entry at all and an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two for the very best How can I Fake Duplex Color Duplex Color is a sneaky way of brightening up a printed page without going to expensive and registration critical full process color What you do is make two passes through the press The first time you put down large squares or highlight blocks of color On the second pass you put dow
372. tock LaserWriter driver forces you to use an Imagewriter emulation mode and prohibits you from sending any raw PostScript Which is handy for rank beginners and for use with several programs that do not know anything about PostScript but is otherwise nearly totally useless Fortunately there s some simple yet sneaky tricks we might play to make the IIgs AppleTalk driver for the LaserWriter actually useful To use your stock driver as an emulator you simply send your first character to C700 and then route all succeeding characters to C707 Just like a plain old serial port The dri vers are built in and ready to go in AppleWorks 2 0 and higher From Applesloth you can do a PR 7 and you are home free To print from AppleWriter in the AppleTalk Imagewriter emulation mode install AppleTalk and use the Chooser II Then click into BASIC SYSTEM Follow this with a PREFIX D2 command and a AW SYSTEM Which will now switch you into AppleWriter without disconnecting the AppleTalk network Finally do a PD7 before you actually print It is a real bear to design your own AppleTalk driver But it is a fairly easy process to modify portions of the existing LaserWriter driver so you can make it do anything you like No you do not need anything special in the way of machine language or IIgs expertise for this The two facts that let us get sneaky are these 1 The initializing routine sent to the printer is all contained in an
373. tor for some uses The low points include totally ignoring AppleWriter especially the IIgs patches In retrospect Apple s unconscion able treatment of far and away their best desktop publishing word pro cessor could only have been caused by Lutus really hacking someone off on his way out the door That much world class stupidity on Apple s part could only have come about through malice aforethought A three disk upgrade of the Hgs Source Code Sampler is also now available and is just about essential to coping with the incredible morass involved in any serious IIgs program ming Contact APDA for details The free Apple user group videos are getting much better See The Making of Pencilman in particular Apple also has a pair of fat new developer packages out These now include the Information Exchange Marketing Guidebook along with the new Information Exhcange Technical Guidebook Get in touch with Peg Bailey at Apple for more info Lots of brand new LaserWriter font sources are now coming out of the woodwork Some of these have fully cracked Adobe s encryptation and sizing hints and thus are offering outstanding typographic quality Actually the secret process isn t nearly as bulletproof as Adobe thinks it is Any patient seventh grader can sight read the eexec files by using nothing but Adobe supplied tools Key portions of the hint machinery are sitting pretty much out in the open in FilxProc in inter
374. tuff And if you need the very latest and the very best of all my PostScript goodies do look into my Work in Progress disks As per usual this is your column 3 Finally do a BSAVE KFC VIRUS A 0300 L 28 D2 4 To test use or abuse your code do a BRUN KFC VIRUS Fig 1 A simple white noise generator 47 1 and you can get technical help and off the wall networking per the end box that follows the usual Names and Numbers section Let us start off by giving you a bunch of static Show me a Simple White Noise Generator Few people realize how easy it is to generate white noise sound effects on most any Apple Figure one gives you a short machine language code routine you might like to try This is based on a 31 stage pseudo random sequence generator It is just a long shift register with feedback from stages 28 and 31 being EOR ed together to form the next input After each shift out comes an apparently random 1 or 0 While the ones and zeros are apparently random and do in fact obey most of the rules of ran dom numbers that same sequence will repeat over and over again once each 2 147 483 647 counts If you get a one out you whap the speaker while if you get a zero out you do nothing The results sound like your Apple is frying itself in its own grease and it is a pretty good although slightly pinkish approx imation to a white noise source The code might be exten
375. und plane as a giant sidewalk Any of the individual objects on the sidewalk can be rotated towards or away from you creating all the more interesting angle views You can move the observer around simply by changing the XO YO and ZO parameters The subjects can be made more or less interesting by a change of OBJROT A custom proc that is similar to the stock PostScript rotation matrix is used to accomplish these rotations As figure five shows us there are both absolute and relative moves and draws All of the relative moves will include any requested rotation those absolute ones will not You should thus use only absolute moves and draws to position an object and then use relative moves and draws for all the rotatable details of that object Curves and arcs are handled by using my curvetrace utilities To do a circle the correct locations of 13 intermediate points are calculated one for each 30 degrees of arc Each of these intermediate points is then converted into a pair of coordinates that are a very small angle before and 37 3 beyond the desired point on your selected curve The four resulting data values are then converted into an X position a Y position and a direction vector These are then used as part of a continuous curvetracing process to generate your desired circle or arc The results are much better and much more accurate than the phony elliptical approximations that were previousl
376. upside down These will demand a plain border For this month s contest just send me a new border that works well with my stupendous new border routines There will be all my usual Incredible Secret Money Machine book prizes along with an all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two for the best border of all If you don t yet have access to a PostScript speaking laser printer just send along any old sketch of any symmetric border that you would like to see automatically adjust itself to fit any image size and do so with perfect corner joints and perfect spacing Yes I am now putting together a new PostScript language super bor der machine package for use with most personal computers The goal is to have more than a thousand non trivial borders ready to go as well as being extendable any manner you like however fancy Do call or write me if you are at all interested in this or most anything else PostScript or whatever 39 6 Don Lancaster s ASK THE GURU June 1988 he FCC has dropped their plan for their proposed 6 per hour hacker telecomm tax thanks in no small part to the cage rattling done by all of you Computer Shopper readers And the foes of computer backup DAT digital audio tape have been dealt two severe blows NBS first laughed them clear out of congress when they showed that their innane hardware DAT protection scheme just plain does not work destroys the program
377. ur per page toner costs to well under a quarter of a cent per page 2 you really should use a duplex printing engine and 3 must totally eliminate any and all ex cessive page makeready time We ve seen in the past how doing your own toner cartridge reloading can get you within shouting distance of 1 and how the latest of Post Script engines now offer 2 The duplex printing can be faked today simply by making a back and a front pass through the machine So the what really needs attacked is 3 The popular pagemaking programs can take an intolerably long three to five minutes to make up a page And even my gonzo justify routines will take a half minute or so per page The obvious question is What tricks can we pull to speed up any later printing of PostScript jobs I have looked into all this rather thoroughly lately and have come up with a few surprising results The bottom line is that PostScript itself is very much faster than most people suspect The apparent slowness is caused by poor communications by poorer programming and by forcing PostScript to do things over and over again that really only need done once or don t even need done at all At present I can reprint a typical 6000 character three column gonzo justified text with headers footers and two fairly complex figures at the full tilt 8 PPM printing time of the LaserWriter NTX Page after new page after new page Forever It sti
378. urface The process gets messy and labor intensive but it can give you some outstanding results It is not nearly as expensive as some competing color proofing schemes Here is how it works You start with a special coated paper or else an instant transfer release liner You then apply a thin layer of your first ink color using special stainless steel grooved rollers You harden the ink with a hair dryer and then apply a photoemulsion overcoat Then you expose the ink through your laser created transparency either with an u v contact printer or by exposing it to the sun for a few minutes Developer is then wiped on which removes the photo resist and all ink that is in unwanted places You can repeat the process for as many colors as you like Related materials are available for raised print thermogra phy and for glass etching A more expensive and competing process is IdentiColor while a much simpler and cheaper system is Kwik Print available through the folks at Light Impressions What is This Month s PostScript Utility The one question most asked on our no charge PostScript helpline is How can I get a font bitmap into a storable or useable form This topic is less than adequately covered in the red blue and green books yet the user demand is very high Normally it is not a good idea to work with font scanmaps or font bitmaps in PostScript since these both might violate device indepen de
379. useful design and layout ideas Turning to all my own products besides the Ask the Guru reprints we now also have the Hardware Hacker reprints from the sister column to this one over in Radio Electronics There s a new disk for the gonzo justify stuff we ll feature here and as usual our PostScript Show and Tell available for most computers The gonzo biggie this month is just that the gonzo justify I have been working on for several years now But first What is in the new IIgs v3 2 System Master Disk Well let s see First it boots faster and is better organized and literally hundreds of bugs have newly been corrected Or at least changed ProDOS 16 can now boot over AppleTalk and the bugs in handling very large and single byte files have been corrected The random memory trashing has also been fixed along with an easing of all the SCSI hard disk format problems The printer drivers have been im proved somewhat in a too little and too late manner The ImageWriter Duplex color tricks Gonzo Justify Stuff Color proofing systems Anti Scratch Pixie Dust New IIgs System Software driver is now faster on images and supports vertical condensed printing A new and totally useless Image Writer LQ AppleTalk driver will now recognize the machine but will not support any of its features While there are substantial new improvements in those LaserWriter drivers for the applications willing to play Apple game
380. ustified text for a dramatic speedup Figure four shows you that PostScript code I use to compile my gonzo justification rou tines You can easily adapt this to any open justification scheme whose awidthshow operators can be temp orarily unbound There are three newer operators here known as startgcompile end gcompile and reportgcompile Let us look at each one in turn The startgcompile gets used to identify where in your textfile you want to begin compiling What it does is first create a new dictionary for each font to be used We do this because we want to sort the all font selections into dictionaries so that all the bold text can be done at once and so on Another reason to do this is so that we can report everything at once rather than having to do so on the fly The awidthshow operator then gets diverted Each time the awidthshow comes up we grab the needed par ameters of the horiontal position the vertical position the char stretch the space stretch and the string to be printed and dump them to the correct dictionary for the current font in use Then the real awidthshow is used to continue with the original imaging and printing process The actual text messages are saved as ASCII character numeric arrays rather than as strings This eliminates the tendency of PostScript strings to arbitrarily change as their defined linkings change The optional endgcompile operator is used if you want to stop compiling
381. utters Patching programs Rubbergrid utilities New LaserWriter ROM PostScript fundamentals to let PostScript become the de facto screen description language as well as the upcoming industry standard page description language PostScript is ridiculously richer and far more powerful than either QuickDraw or GemDraw could ever hope to be By adding a graphics chip PostScript can become much faster as well There s all sorts of exciting laser printer rumors this month A method apparently exists to modulate the dot size on those Canon laser printers letting you dramatically improve the quality of all your photographs and most other halftones Some new third party accelerator boards may shortly be shipping for the LaserWriter that will dramatically speed up PostScript processing Facsimile machines are also about S 1 If you forget your password or if flakey software trashes it you are out 1000 and lots of time Eased but not eliminated in v47 2 Program errors can trip a framedevice blowup that can do subtle to bizarre things to later programs Eliminated in v47 3 Copypage will trash subsequent data making copypage totally useless Eliminated in v47 4 Arcto blows up with too wide a linewidth or wildly wrong data also is position sensitive with a zero radius Not yet corrected 5 Stuck in the snow wheel spinning caused by the prefeed anticipator on large grids can simulate a major paper path failure besides stress
382. ve N EEE E EE E e a a ONTO fe 00 00 00 000 je x olol 2 gt gt gt gt fifa Jel 2Z 2 2 alo XY YY al zl E zE Eo caja oo o zZ m H g E alalalal xaa uw ao ol E WS T Ni GND i i i GND i amp o 2 o PALO L PHIO o2 g 2 3 GND l l l GND 3 2 he ie 4 o PHO ji PHI1 o4 PI GND GND oe O o PHI2 l il PHI2 6 E CND l l l enD 5 9 g o PHIS l LJ PHI 3 3 9 5 9 12 V 12V 9 6 o 10 oWR REQ l l LWR REQS 10 0 410 5 V L 5 V o 11 D 5 V 45 V D g 120 l 0o12 9 13 12 12 13 44 o ENBL ENBL_ 4 4 0 eg cele l 2V o O 5 o RD DATA RD DATA m 160 O16 w E 17 12 V 12 V 7 E 18 oWR DATA wR DATA ig c a i90712V l 12 V_ 0o19 9 20 oWR PROT l WR PROT 20 a 4 7K m Fig 1 Apple Ilgs old disk drive adaptor Ne y The Numeric IIgs tool list Using padding compound PostScript printed circuits IIgs old disk drive adaptor Selecting your laser printer chains that include Computerland or Businessland or from a dealer that has a lock on a regional market The trick is to ask around at your local user group to find out who the good guys and the bad guys are in your particular area You can get a list of all your local Apple user groups by calling 800 538 9696 Extension 500 If you are at all involved with any sort of a school be sure to check into some of Apple s great educational discounts There s also a very lively used Apple market
383. ve supplies and an absolute minimum need for any thing at all photographic I ve been putting together a set of PostScript language printed circuit utilities that does this and a lot more You can do 1X 2X and 4X layouts frontwards or backwards negative or positive artwork with or without an overlay grid in ten or more layers in any size from one square inch up to several acres Very nicely you will always work top side and let your printer handle any trace reversals or inversions for you As per usual with raw Post Script you can use any old word processor on any old personal computer to do the job AppleWriter of course is an especially good choice No special graphics tools or techniques are required and the ordinary text files can then be freely passed over to any other computer The utilities are particularly good for such mixed media job tasks as an instruction book or a manual that needs phantom layouts for servic ing or drilling guides Best of all the routines return hand crafting back to the world of printed circuit layout art This is especially handy for high frequency analog or video circuits It should even be possible to now transfer toner directly to the copper pe board material for an immediate etching and thus eliminating some intermediate photo steps Sadly the techniques I ve looked at so far just barely miss on this additional goal but do stay tuned And of course I would
384. w D D pcs B X f pgox pqt 1 24 pasBold C C Pp i 23 pas C D pasItalic B 1 pgo21 pasOblique C i 25 pasRoman D pas D 1 pasNewCenturySchlbk D D pgosA i pgox 13 pasBook D D l 26 pasBold D pasAvantGarde D D 1 pgos pgox i 28 pasBold B B 14 pasDemi D D H 27 pas B D pgo I pgo 15 pas C D i 17 pasLight D pgo13 1 pasBookman D D 16 pas C D i pgox pgol4 18 pasDemi D 29 pasRoman D i pgo pasPalatino D D i 20 pasDemi B D pgox pgo 30 pasBold D i 19 pasLight B D pgoe pgo 32 pasBold B B 1 12 pasSymbol D 31 pas B D i pgox pgo 1 34 pasZapfDingbats D 4 pasRoman D i pgox pasTimes D D d 33 pasZapfChancery MediumItalic D pgox i pgox 5 pasBold D l 99 pinCustom font name gt D pgo 1 x p set d 7 pasBold B B f 8 6 pas B D 1 y pgot i P 1 pas Bold D i b 0 pasCourier D D 1 f amp 5 pgox i y 2 pasBold C C 1 pas C D i pinHorizontal points gt A pgo0 pinVertical points gt B 9 pas Bold D 1 p 8 pasHelvetica D D i pas D D pgox 1 f lt lt gt gt D lt 10 pasBold C c i y Sea ee ee P f lt lt findfont A 0 0 B 0 0 makefont setfont gt lt y P pat Fig 1 WPL routine to insert PostScript fonts S 49 1 NTX with its any day now expected ROM and processor upgrades Over in the toner wars department several firms are now offering the SX drum recoating at low cost One good source is Lazer Products What has Canon a
385. with embossing or debossing often with spectacular results Here s what I have found out so far Sources of foil and hot stamping machines advertise regularly in both Paper Film and Foil Converter and in Package Printing and Converting magazines A house newsletter with one incredible title is Foiled Again and is published by Transfer Print Foils these people also supply a new November 1989 product called All Purpose Roll Leaf Some of their competitors include Maple Roll Leaf Coburn Lamart Identicolor and Hoechst Hostaphan Finally those Bind It people have a desktop Foil It system that does seem obscenely overpriced at 800 but is otherwise interesting We saw in a previous column how that Merigraph ultraviolet curing photopolymer process will let you convert a laser printed image into a rubber stamp or other printing die The chances are you would have to make a silicon rubber die off the Merigraph die in order to get proper high temperature operation But the potential opportunities here boggle the mind Neat stuff I have this strange feeling that I am only scratching the surface some where way out in left field So why don t you tell me about sources and supplies of foil stamping or of the many brand new things that you can do with them that does involve laser printing We ll have another one of our stupid contests An Incredible Secret Money Machine for the best twenty entries and an all expense pai
386. work here Using the widest feasable columns will also help Columns less than an alphabet and a half wide will intro duce all sorts of visual problems that are inordinately hard to overcome even with many trips through your postjustification editing process That really drove me up the wall back in volume one before Computer Shop per went to their wider and far more readable columns Sometimes working upside down can help you bunches particularly when it comes to picking out shading problems or flowing rivers caused by improper alignment of spaces on several successive text lines Again add remove lengthen shorten ab breviate debreviate or change the tense to eliminate any and all of this type of problem Another obvious use for all your post justification editing is for fitting text to the available space And that is what post justification editing is all about With practice it can be fast and simple and will most often dramatically improve the ap pearance of your final images What is This Month s PostScript Utility We will have a heavy duty routine for advanced PostScript hackers this month that can solve a bunch of very sticky problems for you The figure four code is for an input text scanner A text scanner can take a plain old text stream from any old source and convert it into strings one for each line of text encountered Many of the PostScript routines expect strings as input and manu
387. xcept into a drive or immediately back into its own pro tective envelope Or never allowing smokers in the same bulding as your disks let alone in the same room Anyway sooner or later you may have to try and revive a sick or dead 41 2 July 1988 N wt ee eee ee eee eens TOOL 05 DESK MANAGER 0105 DeskBootInit 0A05 RestScrn 1405 GetDAStrPtr 1B05 GetDAStrPtr 0205 DeskStartUp 0B05 SaveAll 1505 OpenNDA 1C05 CloseNDAByWinPtr 0305 DeskShutDown 0C05 RestAll 1605 CloseNDA 1D05 CloseAl1NDAs 0405 DeskVersion SOEO5 InstallNDA 1705 SystemClick 1E05 FixAppleMenu 0505 DeskReset 0F05 InstallCDA 1805 System Edit 0605 DeskStatus 1105 ChooseCDA 1905 System Task 0905 SaveScrn 1305 SetDAStrPtr S1A05 SystemEvent we ee eee ee eee ee eens TOOL 06 EVENT MANAGER 0106 EMBootInit 0906 DoWindows SOFO06 WaitMouseUp 1506 FlushEvents 0206 EMStartUp 0A06 GetNextEvent 1006 TickCount 1606 GetOSEvent 0306 EMShutDown SOBO6 EventAvail 1106 GetOblTime 1706 OSEventAvail 0406 EMVersion 0C06 GetMouse 1206 GetCaretTime 1806 SetEventMask 0506 EMReset 0D06 Button 1306 SetSwith 1906 FakeMouse 0606 EMStatus 0E06 StillDown 1406 PostEvent wt eee eee eee eee eee eee eee TOOL 07 SCHEDULER 0107 SchBootInit 0307 SchShutDown 05
388. xch def settabstring smsg anchorsearch pop smsg exch def exit ifelse loop tmsg exch def def tabscan tmsg exch def tmsg 033h search halfline true def halfline false def ifelse tabnum 0 def tmsg tabstring search gottatab tabnum tabnum 1 add def settabstring exit ifelse loop ypos ypos yinc halfline 0 5 mul if sub def def ctab ttmsg exch def ypos exch def xleft exch def tabnum 0 def ttmsg n search exch pop exch ttmsg exch def tabscan tabscan exit ifelse loop clear def Fig 4 PostScript code for intelligent data base tabbing N J aa ASK THE GURU number of fonts you like and in any justification mode of any width The code is intended for use with all my gonzo justify routines that we did see back in the October issue but you can adapt it for any code A ctab example appears in figure five You first set up an array that gives you the offset the justification mode the initial font and the total allow able width for each column It pays to have at least one extra entry in this array just in case there might be some extra trailing spaces present in your data base code Note that this is a mixed array The x offset is a decimal value The justification mode is a proc brack eted by curly braces The initial font selection is a string numeric while the maximum column width is once again a decimal value a N input gon
389. xch def translate size dup scale def drawlines 72 300 div Iw mul size div setlinewidth hpos 0 def hlines gs div 1 add cvi hpos 0 moveto 0 vlines rlineto stroke hpos hpos gs add def repeat vpos 0 def vlines gs div 1 add cvi 0 vpos moveto hlines 0 rlineto stroke vpos vpos gs add def repeat def showgrid gsave vlines exch def hlines exch def 100 45 eq 1 0 ifelse setscreen 0 9 setgray gs 1 def Ilw 1 def drawlines gs 5 def Iw 3 def drawlines gs 10 def Iw 5 def drawlines grestore 133 40 dup mul exch dup mul add 1 0 exch sub setscreen def x rlineto currentpoint stroke moveto def xrpt gsave aload pop trips exch def dist exch def rproc exch def trips gsave rproc grestore dist O translate repeat grestore def yrpt gsave aload pop trips exch def dist exch def rproc exch def trips gsave rproc grestore 0 dist translate repeat grestore def Fig 4 Some sample PostScript rubbergrid utilities N wrong Fair enough The usual way to get started in PostScript is with Adobe s PostScript Cookbook and my new Introduction to PostScript video plus the reprints to this ATG column From there you can rent some hands on time at your local school or quick copy center Any IIgs Rumors All sorts of them Some facts even Apple should have sent you a letter by now telling you to go to your dealer and pick up the new ROM and the new video graphics controller chip for your IIgs The
390. y hand led by the II operating system Today though it is probably far better to choose a standard spelling checker It would also be faster and better to rewrite the 2 0 or 2 1 mem ory access code to use all the more powerful IIgs commands I guess it would be heresy to leave the advertorial out of this space So do not forget you can now get bound reprints of all of my Ask The Guru columns And I do have lots of great PostScript stuff for you when you call or write The insanely stupendous miracle fantasmagorical breakthrough for this month involves doing true perspec tive drawing out of AppleWriter that includes accurate circles and arcs and believe it or not genuine per spective lettering More on this shortly But first Which Monitors Work With the Apple IIgs We saw way back in the May 87 column just how to use that Sony KV1311CR receiver monitor with a IIgs This is still my favorite and the one I use Besides ending up 100 cheaper than the Apple color linear RGB monitor this one also is a 196 channel tv set with a remote control and has lots of other neat features Two other linear RGB monitors that are useful with the IIgs are the NEC Multisync and that Magnivox RGB 80 Figures one and two will show you the cable connections to use either one of these alternate mon itors And if you do have a favorite monitor of your own be sure to send your circuit in so we can share it with t
391. y need is a stock NULL modem cable that sells for as little as 5 50 from such outfits as Microcomputer Cable Figure three does show you three different cables that differ only in their chosen connectors So our fourth alternate is to use a plain old NULL modem cable But remember that this will only work as an Apple Talk substitute if there are two and only two nodes present on your net work and if both are always plugged into the same grounded AC outlet Fifth and finally all you really need to work with AppleTalk is some 1K f 1K twist RXD 8 8 tightly TXD 6 4 together GND 4 aD 8 8 eight foot RXD 6 Q maximum length 9 MiniDIN 8 DB9 DB9 male male a male additional drops Fig 4 A multi station AppleTalk cheater cord N J 35 3 doorbell wire Figure four shows you an AppleTalk cheater cord that will work with three or more drops This can only be used if any and all of the computers and printers to be used are always plugged into the very same grounded AC outlet strip What is the New IIgs Monochrome HIRES mode At long last they have figured out how to get rid of the green and purple color fringes on the HIRES screen This beauty is in the latest release 29 of the Apple II Technical Notes The notes are available directly from Apple from your local user group or from many BBS systems All you do is select monochrome
392. y on whether people who use a mouse to process words are or are not a few chips shy of a full board At least one of the new SX drum recoating techniques actually does seem to work A few early reports are showing eight and even nine usable reloads Contact Lazer Products for more details And competition is at long last driving down the cost of new Canon SX and CX cartridges Toners Plus does sell brand new SX cartridges for a mere 79 This is the best price I have seen so far I just can not believe that Hewlett Packard s lawyers are letting them get away with all their blatant mis statements of fact in all of their high ly misleading Thou shall not refill diatribes Besides being ridiculously cheaper properly refilled CX and SX toner cartridges can also be consid erably blacker far denser and much more uniform than the originals I have revised all my gonzo justify routines once again We are now up to GONZO DL 7 and PS UTIL 7 The latest features now include improved simple tabbing individual character kerning a few bug stomps and the changes that can give us all of the PostScript compiling tricks we will look at shortly I ve also rewritten the brick wall texture stuff in my per spective utilities to run ridiculously faster than before Write or call for free printed listings Let s see We gotta cleverly sneak in the usual advertorial here If you are into any traditional IIc and Ie programming check into
393. y rlineto tx 0 rlineto 0 ty neg rlineto closepath fill tox toy moveto 0 setgray show bind def ni currentpoint exch pop Imargin exch moveto 0 10 rmoveto def cp 0 def typeprint nl def typeprint dup type dup currentdict exch known exec unknowntype ifelse readonly def Imargin 72 def rmargin 72 def tprint dup length cp add rmargin gt nl cp O def if dup length cp add cp exch def prnt readonly def cvsprint string cvs tprint tprint readonly def unknowntype exch pop cvlit tprint cvsprint readonly def integertype cvsprint readonly def realtype cvsprint readonly def booleantype cvsprint readonly def operatortype tprint cvsprint readonly def marktype pop mark tprint readonly def dicttype pop dictionary tprint readonly def nulltype pop null tprint readonly def filetype pop filestream tprint readonly def savetype pop savelevel tprint readonly def fonttype pop fontid tprint readonly def nametype dup xcheck not tprint if cvsprint readonly def stringtype dup rcheck tprint tprint tprint pop string tprint ifelse readonly def arraytype dup rcheck dup xcheck tprint typeprint forall tprint tprint typeprint forall tprint ifelse pop array tprint ifelse readonly def packedarraytype dup rcheck dup xcheck tprint typeprint forall tprint tprint typeprint forall tprint ifelse pop packedarray tprint ifelse readonly def courier Courier findfont 10 scalefont def OLDhandleerror errordict handl
394. y scanner y ypos ypos yinc add def def negative linefeed z pm 0 def def zero pmargin end nobreak ypos yinc 6 mul sub ybot It ypos ybot def if def initialcap ypos ypos yinc add yparendadj add def pm dropindent def indentcount dropcount def def stringmacro lets you do a series of gonzolink commands with a single macro keystroke For instance amacro z3c stringmacro def picks a centered font3 with no paragraph for an embedded esc a smac def stringmacro smac exch 0 exch put smac cvn gonzolink exch get cvx exec forall def cvn startgonzo def callout justify routines These are used for quick and dirty layouts and for illustration callouts No scanner is used cc and cr align themselves on xpos independent of txwide xpos ypos String message cl gt left justify xpos ypos String message cf gt fill justify xpos ypos String message cc gt center justify xpos ypos String message cr gt right justify cl save snapcl exch def msg exch def ypos exch def xpos exch def justx justL def msg gonzojustify snapcl restore def cf save snapcf exch def msg exch def ypos exch def xpos exch def justx justF def msg gonzojustify snapcf restore def cc save snapcc exch def msg exch def ypos exch def 2500 sub xpos exch def txtwide 5000 def justx justC def msg gonzojustify snapcc restore def cr save snapcr exch def msg exc
395. y solid blacks over the larger fill areas This happens because some corner cutting would seem inevitable But this difficulty gets eased bunches by selecting the correct paper and by using a toner cartridge that is at its maximum blackness after its second refill with a good third party product Contrary to some tales that are circulating solid black fills can most definitely be obtained with a black write engine I do it all the time It does take some care and attention to detail to accomplish this though Now in the case of a white write va S piezo speaker 12 Vo c EOF LED oe ON air 0 1 uF OFF water 0 01 uF Fig 3 A typical use for my dipdraw routine 7 machine all of the black fills are totally solid most of the time The problem here is that any small typo graphy particularly anything less than seven point will totally wash out and become nearly illegible You ll also find a tendency to white out the lightest shades of gray with a white write system There are two other big differences between the black write and white write engines A black write laser engine will normally have a much longer laser diode life since most parts of most documents are white rather than black A second problem common to both methods is that linear gray shading is not possible particularly with the denser screens The black write sys tems tend towards darker grays than you would expect
396. y sources As always you can now get a listing of your local Apple and other user groups right here in Computer Shopper or else call 800 538 9696 Extension 500 There is also a special new users supergroup for club ambassadors It is called AAJN and is short for Apple Ambassador s Information Network Meanwhile there s an outfit called K 12 MicroMedia that has bunches of AppleWorks programs and accessor ies available You might like to give them a call for more info There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that the super secret new IIgs upgrade is so fast that it can execute an infinite loop in one minute and seventeen seconds flat And the winnar is Dale Rice of Lansing Michigan does win the all expense paid FOB Thatcher AZ tinaja quest for two in our padding compound contest To quote Dale First go to the bank and request 40 or 50 brand new uncirculated one dollar bills It is super important to get them in se quence to insure they are crisp and uncirculated Next use the padding compound and some cardboard to create a note pad of the bills Be sure to include a now is the time to re order slip near the stack bottom Now take your pad along to your favorite bar or restaurant and when it is time to pay peel off the bills from your George Washington notepad It is better than candid camera Other entrants did suggest using padding compound to bulletproof Easter eggs and other fragile craft items
397. y used by draftsmen except for the most severely squashed of circles The really squashed stuff can be easily handled by adding a few more intermediate points The lettering is done with my pixel line remapping routines The mes sage gets scanned exactly one line of vertical pixels at a time Each pixel line is then perspective transformed and height scaled so it drops into the proper place at the proper size in the final image Yes as the image rotates zooms or expands the lettering will auto matically adjust itself to give the correct result There s no limit to your choice of fonts In fact any thing that you can show flat on any PostScript page can be pasted onto any side of any perspective object in your image Anywhere The PostScript processing speed is amazingly fast for most perspective drawing although things will slow down on an irregular clipping boun dary These already fast times can be much further sped up by compiling or pseudo compiling done with my PostScript utilities That pixel line remapping involved in the perspective lettering might become excruciatingly slow for large letters or long messages But as per usual there s that good old Uh compared to what factor The perspective techniques shown here can of course be ported over to most any personal computer All you will really need is your favorite word processor or comm program These routines can all be extended just for you
398. you are running on a single 5 volt supply the TXD and TXD lines will swing between 0 and 5 volts so your RXD input should get connected to a well by passed 2 5 volt reference On the other hand if all your input signals swing from 5 to 5 volts then you should ground the RXD input It is super important to remember that RXD will do absolutely nothing if RXD is not connected since the serial receiver works on the current difference present between these two pins For a logic one the current must go in the RXD line and out the RXD line The opposite is true for a logic zero condition Most Apple products including the IIc Ie IIgs the Macs and all of the various LaserWriters have unique serial hardware drivers which can handle any of these three standards They do this by employing a pair of outputs that swing from 5 to 5 and by using differential input pairs Figure one once again shows you how to get from a Mini DIN 8 to RS 232 and vice versa by using what Apple calls a modem cable and what the others call a straight through cable On the transmitter end RXD is left unconnected and RXD is used as a driver This handles the negative logic needed by RS232 Over on the receiver end RXD is grounded while RXD senses the RS232 levels Figure two shows you the crossed over connections needed for what the Apple folks call a printer cable and what others call a null modem cable This is by far the more p
399. you can stick onto any surface It is similar to the others we looked at in recent columns Let s see I do have Ask the Guru volumes I and II and the Hardware Hacker volume II currently shipping along with my PostScript Show and Tell for all major personal computers Write or call per the Need Help box if you need more info Our biggie this month is a three column gonzo layout template having auto left right and built in figures But first these topics What Good is WPL WPL is that unusual supervisory Word Processing Language built into AppleWriter With fresh new copies of ProDos Applewriter 2 1 and both manuals now once again available for only 29 from Sun Remarketing now might be a good time to review WPL What WPL does is automate most any list of word processing tasks It March 1989 is sort of similar to an EXEC file or some type of C shell supervisor that you would find in the other personal computers As a rudimentary lan guage it does support labels strings comments numeric variables math operations subroutines loops gotos and simple testing decisions With WPL you can easily create help screens produce form letters get user inputs do auto formatting do any automated search and replace 50 S 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 100 105 110 115 120 Screen density in dots per inch
400. you finish off the annodizing process by boiling the plates in special glop The glop seals up the formerly open or sponge surface of the aluminum and creates a smooth sapphire hard and quite transparent aluminum ox ide overcoat that will protect and lock in the photo image The image gets actually locked inside of the aluminum rather than on its surface While you can in fact damage a Metalphoto dialplate by physically gouging it out it is almost totally resistant to heavy wear handling or weathering most industrial solvents vandals and many chemicals Metalphoto is available in several sizes thicknesses and colors ranging from foils to plate One single 3 x 5 inch dialplate may cost you around 5 using this process With a normal exposure you ll get black over color If instead you use va Fig 4 A typical PostScript standard point layout grid N a negative image you will get color ed lettering over a black background The uses are obvious signs logos nameplates dials etc The Metal photo salesmen even use aluminum business cards with their own per sonal halftone photo on them The museums and exhibit park and mon ument people all like Metalphoto because it is reasonably vandal and weather resistant Back in the golden age of hacker electronics check out Popular Elec tronics in 1967 to 1970 I did use Metalphoto for dozens of different project dialplates and even ha
401. yposN yheighiN and returns it to the host This output may then be defined b as a single array get run length encoded or else converted to a bitmap o To use include reportvlinemap as the last command in your imageproc Ree ve WARNING reportvlinemap is specific for version 38 0 and older LaserWriters stall 50 37 sin pop repeat def extra delay needed by some hosts reportvlinemap false charpath clip newpath 100 dup moveto 1000 0 rlineto 0 1000 rlineto 1000 0 rlineto closepath clip clippath mark moveto lineto curveto closepath pathforall dup stripe exch def length 1 sub stripelength exch def mark 0 13 stripelength sposn exch def stripe sposn get stripe sposn 1 add get transform round cvi exch xshift sub round cvi 75 add exch dup 3268 exch sub exch stripe sposn 6 add get stripe sposn 7 add get transform exch pop round cvi sub neg exch 1 index sub yshift sub exch for flush stall def xshift O def yshift 0 def defaults drawvlinemap converts an array of form XO YO DYO X1 Y1 DY1 XN YN DYN into the actual image drawing one piece of one scan line at a time drawvlinemap vlinearray exch def gsave 0 setlinewidth 0 setlinecap 72 300 div dup scale 0 3 viinearray length 1 sub cvi vlp exch def vlinearray vip get vlinearray vip 1 add get moveto 0 viinearray vip 2 add get rlineto stroke for grestore def drawhlinemap converts an array of form XO YO DXO X1 Y1 DX1 XN YN DXN into t
402. zo 6 ctab and this code font0 Times Roman findfont 12 0 0 12 0 0 makefont setfont def font1 Times Bold findfont 12 0 0 12 0 0 makefont setfont def font2 Times ltalic findfont 12 0 0 12 0 0 makefont setfont def font3 Helvetica findfont 12 0 0 12 0 0 makefont setfont def tablist begin O O cl 1 1000 def first column bold left justify 1 67 cf 0 39 def second column normal fill justify 2 152 cc 2 1000 def third column italic center justify 3 250 cr 0 1000 def fourth column normal right justify 4 999 cl 0 1000 def spare to swallow any trailing zeros end yinc 13 def vertical spacing maxsstretch 0 def a sneaky trick to stretch characters maxcstretch 100 def and not spaces for this fill justify 85 90 moveto 0 128 rlineto 278 0 rlineto 0 128 rlineto closepath stroke and this data base info 100 200 aardvark sulphur eggplant 12 345 06 giraffe oxygen artichoke 1297 55 gnu silicon okra 3 22 javelina krypton brocolli 345 96 033h elephant sodium rhubarb 36 834 71 wallaby carbon celery 1 23 ostrich helium potato 223 41 kangaroo gallium cucumber 1254 33 Petal showpage togetthis result aardvark sulphur eggplant 12 345 06 giraffe oxygen artichoke 1297 55 gnu silicon okra 3 22 javelina krypton brocolli 345 96 elephant sodium rhubarb 36 834 71 wallaby carbon celery 1 23 ostrich helium potato 223 41 kangaroo gallium cucumber 1254 33 Fig 5

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