As part of its ongoing commitment to RISC OS, Castle today announces its new and eagerly anticipated version of the RISC OS Printer Manager - 'pop-up' !Printers. This new printer manager replaces existing versions of !Printers and offers many fixes to long standing bugs and the following new features:
Pop-up Configuration
Connecting a new printer will cause !Printers to self-configure the new printer, popping up an active printer icon on the icon bar immediately with no manual setting up required.
"New printer" Window
If the Printer Manager does not recognise a particular printer, a simple dialogue box appears allowing the user to select an appropriate Printer Definition File from those installed on the computer.
Full USB Support
The new !Printers seamlessly supports USB printers. The plug and play features of USB mean that a wide range of USB printers can now be used on all IYONIX pc computers, even through low cost USB to parallel adapters.
New "Duplicate" Feature
Duplicate is a new feature that allows the user to 'clone' multiple configurations for a single physical printer. This makes it easy, for example, to switch between draft and high resolution without having to keep reconfiguring the printer manager.
Support for 'Long Control Strings'
In support of the technical changes to the printer dumper software (details of which are freely available from http://www.iyonix.com/32bit/PDumper.shtml) the Printer Manager can now send very long control strings to the printer. This is important as many modern low cost inkjet printers communicate using human readable messages which can be too long for use by !Printers up to at least version 1.64a.
"Install New Printer" Shortcut
The process of installing a new printer has been greatly simplified by a new shortcut in the icon bar menu. Clicking on the "Install new printer" shortcut brings up the available printer definitions and a simple double-click installs the desired driver.
Other features include:
Multiple printers on icon bar
Editable printer name
Background spooled printing
Queue control
Sharing for networked printers
Parallel connection support
Serial connection support
Network connection (NetFS, Econet)
Print to file, optionally appending to file
Choice of paper sizes
Editable paper sizes
Drivers for a wide range of printers
(e.g. Canon BJ S330, S550, S530D and many others)
Pop-up !Printers on the IYONIX pc
All IYONIX pc computers now come with 'pop-up' !Printers. This is a free upgrade for all existing IYONIX pc users through the IYONIX pc update system and will be made available on CD soon.
Pop-up !Printers on RISC OS 3 and RISC OS 4 computers
The 'pop-up' !Printers will be available soon for existing RISC OS 3 and RISC OS 4 users - further information on this will be released in due course.
Castle's all-new 32-bit IYONIX pc - THE WORLD'S FIRST XSCALE DESKTOP COMPUTER - will be running 'pop-up' !Printers at the Wakefield RISC OS show on the 10th May 2003. IYONIX pcs will be on sale at this event.
For more information on the 32-bit IYONIX pc visit www.iyonix.com
Issued by Mike Williams on behalf of Castle Technology Ltd