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At the June 2006 meeting, the earlier (Feb 2005) look at UniPrint was reviewed with particular reference to using it with VirtualAcorn's Adjust and the upgrade to UniPrint version 2.02.
The simplicity of installation was demonstrated again, literally following the instructions provided by R-Comp, the primary distributors of this commercial software. First, installing the one component which operates at the Windows end of the network (uniprint.exe) so that it is run at the startup of Windows, placing a square greyish icon in the Task tray. This icon provides access to various Windows functions, of which, more later, perhaps.
Installation in VirtualAcorn's Adjust on Tony Lister's laptop followed. (He had bought the Virual Acorn version at the recent Wakefield Show.) The supplied software (on floppy) provides almost automatic installation (by Acorn/RISC OS standards), distributing various files and mini-applications around various locations on the hard disc. Starting by copying the floppy contents into the $.Printing directory, running !UniInst puts files all over the place and puts !UniSetup and a Printer Definition File (UniPrint) into $.Printing. This was followed by setting up !Printers with any number of new drivers using the PDF "UniPrint". Each new printer icon on the iconbar is then Configured in any of the usual ways to rename the icon and set the Resolution and Quality as appropriate. For example our first icon (on the left)
was renamed (on the right) "UniCol300" and had a resolution of 300x300 dpi with Quality set to "Colour, halftoned (fine)". The Paper selection had already been set to "A4 (UniPrint)" which paper size had been installed by !UniInst in $.!Boot.Choices.Printers.PaperRW. The !Printers Choices were Saved from the iconbar menu BEFORE Quitting !Printers.
Next came the turn of !UniSetup whose function is to tell the RISC OS end of the system (in this case Virtual Acorn) where to send the generated print file. Running !UniSetup opens a window which lists all the Printers (PDFs) that exist under RISC OS: those newly created to work with UniPrint and those previously existing for printing entirely within RISC OS. The latter appear greyed out in the list.
The UniPrint titles are selectable. So, one at a time, a title is selected and the Edit button is clicked, opening a new dialog box called "Edit UniPrint Connection".
There are 4 radio buttons and normally the appropriate button is already selected. At this point the button for Virtual Acorn was already selected. Next, the button "Advanced" at the middle lower edge of the box is clicked to open yet another box called, surprisingly, "UniPrint Advanced Settings".
The Printer name (selected in the first box) was already visible and "virtualacorn" was already entered in the writable icon named "Server". All that remains then is to enter a suitable reference to the Printer to be used by UniPrint. Sufficient guidance is given within this box to enable the entry of a suitably short reference. In Tony's case, he entered "Lexmark". Then you close the two topmost boxes by clicking on the OK buttons, leaving you back in the "Available (UniPrint) Printers" box. If there are more UniPrint printers available you repeat the above steps for each one. Finally, close the "Available Printers" box by clicking on the "Save" button. You are now ready to load up !Printers and start printing from Virtual Acorn to any Windows printer which has been plugged into a USB port and configured in Windows.
Printing is achieved in the normal RISC OS way. In Virtual Acorn load up the application and file from which printing is to be done, select the appropriate Printer icon on the iconbar and select "Print" in your usual way. Set up the printing dialog and click OK. There follows the usual rendering progress window and when that closes a small advisory window opens for a short period to tell you that your document will be printed shortly. Soon afterwards, the printer bursts into life and your document is printed in the quality and numbers of copies that you selected in the RISC OS part of the process.
About this time you will notice that, if you were working Virtual Acorn in full screen mode, that the screen display looks a bit odd. It has in fact reverted to a multi-window display and you will find it necessary to press Alt-Enter twice to get back to a clear full screen display of Virtual Acorn. This latter oddity is a minor inconvenience relative to the advantage of being able to use the full facilities of the Windows printer. An example of this advantage is clear when you try printing a photograph first directly from Windows using a Windows application and then the same photograph directly from any appropriate RISC OS application but through the UniPrint system. I have printed from both Ovation Pro and DPlngScan (formerly known as ImageMaster) with identical results compared with the direct Windows prints.
If you want to use UniPrint from a separate RISC OS machine (not Virtual Acorn), you setup the RISC OS end in exactly the same way as for Virtual Acorn but using "!UniSetup" from the RISC OS machine which again will identify those PDFs you will have setup for UniPrint on that RISC OS machine. The main difference you will see when you click on "Edit" in the "Available (UniPrint) Printers" box is that when the "Edit UniPrint Connection" box opens, the radio button alongside "Network connection (standard)" will be already selected.
Then clicking on the "Details" button will open the "UniPrint Network Connection" box where you will have to enter the IP address of your Windows machine (mine says "192.168.0.4") as well as a suitable short reference to the printer connected to the Windows machine. Click on "OK" and again on "OK" to get back the "Available Printers" box, where you can set up the other printer connections before finally clicking on "Save".
If you hold down Shift and click with Right button on the mouse (called Adjust) on any of the printer icons on the iconbar, it opens the "Connections" dialog box for that defined printer.
This reveals that the simple connections procedure described above has magically set the the connection to print to "File" and that file will be sent to the named printer at the end of the network for which the IP address was entered.
From the above, you should have already realised that your separate RISC OS machine has to be networked to your Windows machine. If there are just the two machines, this can be achieved quite simply using a "Cross-over" ethernet cable plugged into the LAN sockets on each machine. If not already fitted, the RISC OS machine will need a network card. Then you have to configure the IP addresses of each machine. This another story.
(Disclaimer: Any errors in the above description are mine, but you should be quite capable of following the fully detailed instructions in the paperwork from R-Comp.)
UniPrint 2.02 was an upgrade which made printing simpler for RISC OS users in that it transferred many of the settings (which previously had to be made through Windows Printer Preferences) to the RISC OS end of the sequence. Thus, the number of copies required is now entered in the Print dialog of the RISC OS application from which you are printing. Similarly, in double-sided printing, this is controlled from the RISC OS printing dialog.
Version 2.02 also brought improvements to the function of launching documents from RISC OS into their appropriate applications in Windows. One main example is that of launching a URL from RISC OS to open the default HTML browser in your Windows machine. This is desirable only when you know in advance that the website referenced in the URL is one which has been deliberately designed to work properly only with Internet Explorer or another browser with almost equal capability, like Mozilla's Firefox. When you find a site that will not render properly with Oregano or Fresco because their JavaScript handling is inadequate, you find, for example on an e-commerce site that you can fill your basket and go to check-out only to find that after entering all your details, the "Submit" button won't work. All a waste of time.
Previously, some UniPrint users found that the URL Launching function did not work if a particular browser was already on the RISC OS iconbar. It would persist in opening the RISC OS browser even though the proper setup had been engaged to pass the URL through to Windows. The upgrade reduced the possibility happening, but for those who still had this problem, a small application was included with UniPrint, called "!UniLaunch" which places an icon on the iconbar called "UniSrv". For URLs, clicking on UniSrv opens a window with a writable icon into which you can copy and paste the URL of concern. Bingo, the Windows browser opens for that address.
!UniLaunch (UniSrv) also provides another function for those awkward people who when they receive a Windows-specific file (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.) attached to an email, can't be bothered to transfer the file over the network and then open it directly in Windows. Perhaps they just want a quick look to see what the file is about, without doing any work on it. In which case, it is much faster to just drag the file to the UniSrv icon when it will be sent to the Windows machine which will recognise the 3-character extension and open the file in the appropriate Windows application. If you then want to edit it and return it to the sender, you can save and work on it in Windows and transfer the edited version back to RISC OS for emailing. This is not a major feature of UniPrint, but very useful for those people described above. There is more about these peripheral features in the R-Comp instructions.
During the evening, the various functions of printing and launching of URLs and Windows files from RISC OS were demonstrated.
Today's price on R-Comp's website http://www.rcomp.co.uk showed £40 for the Virtual Acorn only version and £49 for the Deluxe version which can be installed on both Virtual Acorn and on a separate RISC OS machine. Apparently, it will work on any Acorn/RISC OS system of 3.1 or higher.
Frank Watkinson, 23rd June 2006
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