Textures & Printing

Textures & Printing

Postscript Printing

Q & A
PostScript Printing Tips

Bitmap Printing

Q & A

Turn on Error Handling in the LaserWriter 8 driver

Foreground printing

Saving Output to a File

What kind of printer do I have?

There are two basic kinds of printer: PostScript printers and bitmap printers. A PostScript printer contains inside it a computer of its own, a PostScript interpreter. A bitmap printer, on the other hand, has all of its imaging done by your computer. These two different ways of going about printing require different resources, and can go wrong in different ways.

PostScript Printing

Examples of PostScript printers include the Apple LaserWriter IINTX, Pro 630, Personal LaserWriter 320 (but not the 300!), and the Hewlett Packard Laserjet 4M. Most printers will come with 2 Mb of memory, not enough for most TeX jobs or large graphics files. I'd recommend at least 4Mb, and I've never seen our LaserWriter IINTX with 5 MB RAM fail to print a document.

Here are some questions and answers, ala the FAQ. You may also want to read the document "Textures & PostScript Printers." Both of these are available from the Blue Sky ftp site.

Q & A

When I try to print MyFile.tex, all of the fonts come out as Courier! What is wrong?
The problem could be caused by one of two things: Improper Font placement or not enough printer memory. If all your documents are in Courier, even small ones, then the first problem is more likely. Nine times out of ten, however, printing problems are caused by printer RAM being overloaded with fonts. A PostScript printer should have at least 4 Mb of RAM to handle the large number of fonts in a typical TeX document.

When I print, all the fonts come out as Courier: reprise.
The other usual problem with printing is that people have moved their "cm/ps screen fonts" suitcase to their TeX fonts folder. This will make the fonts look okay on the screen, because Textures can find them, but when printing with background printing (the default with newer LaserWriter drivers) the fonts won't come out. The solution is either to switch off background printing or to put the fonts in the right place.

Why can't I get Blackboard Bold or the AMS fonts to print? They look fine on the screen.
If you have the AMS fonts and are having problem printing them, there may be a very easy solution. If your documents print out fine, except there is a blank space wherever there is supposed to be an AMS symbol, change your screen depth to 256. These fonts will not print if your screen is set to thousands or millions of colors.

I use the Japanese version of the Mac OS, version 7.x (7.5, 7.6 etc) J, and my Textures documents refuse to print. They work correctly with the US versions of the Mac OS. What is the problem?
Replace KanjiTalk 7.5.5J (for PowerMac7300 only) with MacOS 8.0J. (LaserWriter8.4.2J will be replaced with LaserWriter8.4.3J.) According to README documents in Apple System software, OS 7.x J (x is greater than or equal to 6) there were some problems associated with (desktop) printing. (Thanks to Junsei for this tip)

PostScript Printing Tips

If printing is not working for you, try a few of these tricks:
Turn off Background printing in the chooser. This will cause printing to go through the system, and the messages from the driver will be "in your face" so you can observe the printing process. This also removes one layer of complication, the print monitor mess, from the process.
Try this little Plain TeX file (in flash mode), which isolates one font at a time. Starting with Times checks that most of the system is working fine:
 \nopagenumbers
\font\testA=times at 21.3pt 
\testA Here is a sample of Times, a printer-resident font.
   
Then try printing. Does it work? If Times prints then Textures, your system, and your printer are all working together. Now let's add a Computer Modern font:
\font\testB=cmdunh10 at 21.3pt 
\testB Here is a sample of Computer Modern Dunhill, a fine-looking font.
   
If the combination of Times and Dunhill prints, but your documents don't print, then you're probably running into the font/printer RAM wall. To determine just how much your printer can take, add a few more fonts to the mix until it breaks, like so:
\font\testC=cmr17 at 19pt 
\testC Here's Computer Modern Roman, design size 17.
Try switching printer drivers. We recommend LaserWriter 8 for use with most PostScript printers, but sometimes a different driver will help. Versions 7.1.2 and 8.1.1 are nice vintages. Version 7.1.2 will allow you to use the "unlimited downloadable fonts" option, which will sometimes make printing work even if you don't have enough RAM.
Try turning off the "unlimited downloadable fonts" option, which is generally a bad thing to have on anyway, in spite of what I just said.
Bitmap Printing

Examples of bitmap printers include the Apple ImageWriter II, StyleWriter II, Color StyleWriter 2400, LaserWriter Select 300 (the 310 is PostScript), Personal LaserWriter 300, and the Hewlett Packard DeskWriter 560C.

Bitmap printing with the Computer Modern PostScript fonts involves Textures, the printer driver, and ATM. There have been some problems, historically, with the Stylewriter printer driver, as well as with some of the HP DeskWriter drivers. Some of the Stylewriter problems have been fixed in the newer driver, which is available from Apple's ftp server.

Since ATM does the font rendering for your printer and your screen, any differences between what you see and what comes out of the printer are almost certainly caused by the printer driver. We can't guarantee that you'll be able to print from Textures on any printer with any printer driver, but we can probably get something to work for you. One clever trick which often works is to use an Apple driver, no matter what kind of printer you're using. An Apple driver will often work for many different printers.

Q & A

Why does the notequals character print out as an equal sign on my Epson 740 printer?
This is a bug in their printer driver, which causes zero-width characters (like the slash in the notequals composite character) to be omitted from the printout. We're trying to get in touch with Epson to fix this.
Why do I get backwards-pointing arrows in the printout of my Hewlett-Packard printer?
This is a bug in their printer driver, which misinterprets our font encodings. We're trying to get in touch with HP to fix this.
Why is the lower bar of my square bracket missing at some sizes?
This is an ATM problem, and will only affect bitmap printing. It happens because some of the "text" characters that ATM is rendering are actually special math characters which don't conform to the norms of letterforms. The extra-high and extra-low bits of things like square brackets confuse ATM. Your document will print well on a PostScript printer.
I've purchased a StyleWriter II, and I'm having problems when I print my Textures documents on it. Tops of some large characters are cut off, slashes don't get printed through negated relations (for example, \neq looks like =), and after printing the document the fit-to-window preview shows the document as being about the size of a postage stamp in the upper left corner of an extremely large piece of paper. Is there any cure for these problems?
Apple has fixed several of these problems with their 1.2 version of the StyleWriter II driver. You should be able to get the new driver from Apple's ftp server.. The "postage stamp" problem is still around, and occurs also with the Apple Personal LaserWriter (the non-PostScript one). The only fix I know is to copy the text into a new document and retypeset. Printing will mess it up again.

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