Printer Drivers

There are two ways of printing your PipeDream document. The method you choose depends upon:

Both methods use a printer driver which you can think of as acting as an interpreter between your document as it appears on the screen and your document when printed.

You can either use a PipeDream printer driver or a RISC OS printer driver. The fundamental difference between the two is that PipeDream printer drivers are text-oriented whereas RISC OS printer drivers are graphics-oriented, i.e. they build up a graphic picture of your document in tiny dots and then print those dots. This means that the fonts you can produce are completely independent of the printer's typefaces. They are defined by what is available in the computer.

RISC OS printer drivers

PipeDream printer drivers

Highlight characters are treated differently. PipeDream printer drivers contain fields in which you type sequences of codes to perform operations such as underlining, bold, italics, superscripts and subscripts and, to a limited extent, font changes. These font changes are produced by the printer, using the different typestyles it has available; they are nothing to do with the fonts that RISC OS has available. The RISC OS printer drivers differ in that, if you want to print in bold or italic, there must be a bold or italic version of the font available on your Archimedes.

It may seem confusing to have two different ways of printing but in fact PipeDream is giving you the best of both worlds. In practice, you will probably find that one method suits your set-up and needs and stick to that method. If you have a daisywheel printer, the choice is easy - use the PipeDream printer driver called DAISYWHEEL provided in the PipeDream archive. If you have a laser or inkjet printer, you will probably use an appropriate RISC OS printer driver. If you have a dot-matrix printer, you can use either type of printer driver - RISC OS if you want to print pictures within your text or to have different fonts or sizes, PipeDream if you want to print quickly and need no more than simple highlights such as underline or bold.

For information on See
Editing PipeDream printer drivers PipeDream Printer Driver Editing