Spectre GCR Manual Manuals - Atari Documentation Archive

Printers and Spectre o
This is a 72 dpi image; each Atari/Mac screen dot becomes 16
laser dots (4 x 4 grid). It's rotated 90 degrees on the page and is cen­
tered, so that the wide part of the paper matches the width of the Atari
screen, much like Atari's screen dump.
Bit for bit screen dumps are done with Shift-Keypad-I. This
dumps the current screen memory in the ST to the Laser Printer. A
normal 640 x 400 screen is only an about 2 x 1.5" inches on the laser
output, so I suggest using a program such as Stepping Out to
expand available screen memory (it works), then call up Shift­
Keypad-I. Some experimentation is in order here; the program
attempts to adjust for different screen sizes, but there are limits. Still,
it's very interesting to see a large Stepping Out screen size showing up
on the laser.
I don't expect you to use Shift-Keypad-I a lot, but it's useful in
certain situations, and as you see, I try to give you the maximum flexi­
bility.
>- QuickDraw Support: The Mac uses something called QuickDraw
(fun name, huh?) to do all its screen draws. It can also use it to print
things, since QuickDraw is really smart.
Unfortunately, a "printer driver", the software that makes
QuickDraw talk to the printer, is an extremely obscure and hard to
write thing. Just to make it more fun, the rules of printer drivers keep
changing; HyperCard, for instance, does things in a totally new way.
So, I decided to handle printing by emulation. I make the SLM804
act like an ImageWriter. The printer emulator accepts data as though it
were an lmageWriter dot-matrix printer, and prints it to the SLM804.
The only printer driver required is Apple's own ImageWriter, which is
included with the System disks, and goes in the System Folder. You
use Chooser to select the driver, and then select Print from the File
menu. Easy, huh?
To use this option, once again, you must enable SLM804 from the
Spectre Menu page. When you select SLM804, Spectre also automati­
cally enables the ImageWriter "printer interceptor".
The printer interceptor grabs printer stuff instead of sending it
out the printer port, and redirects it to the SLM804. While the intercep­
tor is active, you can't "print" out the normal Atari printer hookup
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