Re: [NTLK] Partial Success going from Notes to PDF

On Jul 29, 2008, at 4:34 PM, Ed Miller wrote:

> Don, just to be make sure I understand right, when you refer to
> printing without LPR, you're referring to using a newton-compatible
> printer, yes?
>
> This brings me to something I don't quite understand - maybe someone
> can weigh in on this, but were newtons ever able to print out ink text
> notes, say via straight to newton compatible printers? Was there once
> a time where you could get more than "Boo" written in ink-text off the
> device?
>
> I'm wondering, if it was possible to print ink text notes from a
> newton style printer, then wouldn't it be possible to just capture the
> data coming out of the newton serial port, dump that on your mac/PC,
> and just use some software, purely on the computer, to convert the raw
> data to postscript, PDF, etc.? This would be something that doesn't
> require installing the LPR driver on the newton but rather uses the
> internal newton printing software, unmodified. Is this idea feasible?
>
> Ed

Funny thing someone should mention using a newton-comaptible printer.
It made me remember my mom had an old 60x PowerPC Mac and a
StyleWriter 1200 in her office. So i took my newton over there and
connected it to the stylewriter (which works without any extra
extensions). I created a note with ink text that was about two
paragraphs long and printed it. The style writer started doing its
thing and spit out a page of the text i wrote in less than a minute.
Not a problem. At first it was printing continuously, then after
about the 5th line it slowed down to printing one line at a time
(probably waiting on a buffer).

I did notice that printing to a real printer acts just like the LPR
printer: the connection is started; the pages are prepared/printed
(in the stylewriter case the printer is working at this time; and the
connection is closed). From what I observe the LPR driver caches the
printed document locally then sends everything over the network at
once. So it may be correct to assume there is a memory issue. I used
TCP flow to capture the packets of some notes printed with the LPR
driver. I created a new note and wrote "simple note to print" in ink
text. Then created another note writing the same thing only in text.
After printing both files I compared the amount of data sent. The ink
text data totaled 17,255 bytes. The text data was 7,258 bytes That's
a difference of 2.38x. You can see how the file size would grow very
quickly.

For comparison I fired up NCU under Classic to see now notes with ink
text were exported. You will be surprised (or maybe not) to learn
that ink text is exported as an image file. Also, if the ink text
extends beyond the bottom of the window, then its too large to
export. So even if Classic worked under Leopard and you used NCU, I
don't thing it would give you the results you wanted.

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Received on Tue Jul 29 21:05:18 2008