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[idiot]

I finally got my old hard drive ripped and am going through my old Final Writer 97 docs. I had a number of newsletters for my band (lots of graphics and font usage) which I'd like to recover.

Unfortunately I can't find a suitable solution to get them off the amiga, short of zooming in and taking 50 million screen shots and piecing them all together.

I can't even get winUAE to print to my printer. My guess would be there's some way to trick the emulator into printing to a pdf or something, but even capturing the printer output to a bitmap would be good. I'm actually surprised there isn't a way to set this up in the winUAE settings.

I've read something about setting up a "postscript printer" whatever that is, but there is no such printer in my Amiga printer control panel. There's a seperate postscript control panel, but I don't know how to tell the emulator to use it.

It's just set up to print to the old HP Laserjet on the parallel port. WinUAE doesn't pick this up though when I tell it to point that to my printer. I'd rather it point to a file though, as I'd just have to rescan the printout and lose quality.

[RW222]

Think I managed to get a postscript file one time by pipeing PAR: to a file with a postscript printer slected.

[motorollin]

Never used this so can't vouch for it, but found it simply by Googling for "finalwriter pdf" (without the quotes)

FinalWriter PDF Creator

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moto

[RW222]

Interesting....

I had a version of ghostscript for the Amiga, needed a lot of chipram to work. Had to close down MUI and stuff to use it. However, this may or may not be the case here, just bear it in mind if you have issue and strip the WB to basics.

Also, I used Final Copy 2 to do work for university, so I'm sure it has MS word .doc format compatibility somewhere... might only be word 5.0 or something. Also thought it had wordperfect 6 compatibility.

[idiot]

Again, this is on an emulator. I don't know what a post script printer is or how to configure it on winUAE.

I was hoping there was a way to point the emulator to a file, so I could print on the emulated amiga environment and winUAE would save it as a file.

I keep hearing about "ghostscript" which talks about a post script printer, which as I said I don't know what is. The final writer to PDF thing requires it also, and some other things (the instructions are not english so there's no help there). My amiga's printer prefs are something like "hp laser jet, generic, etc" nothing about a postscript printer.

Regardless, when I set it up to print the parallel port of the emulated amiga to my actual printer it doesn't work.

Could this be my install of the workbench? Would I be better off trying to get the required files for Final Writer 97 to work on the default AIAB setup? That runs in a high resolution (mine doesn't -- not sure how to get that to work), so if nothing else screen shots would be easier to do.

RW222 wrote:
Think I managed to get a postscript file one time by pipeing PAR: to a file with a postscript printer slected.

Can you explain more step by step what this means? Does it work with graphics and fonts?

[motorollin]

idiot wrote:
Again, this is on an emulator. I don't know what a post script printer is or how to configure it on winUAE.

I'm guessing this won't be an issue with the PDF Creator I posted above, since it doesn't print, it exports to PDF (I assume).

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moto

[idiot]

motorollin wrote:
I'm guessing this won't be an issue with the PDF Creator I posted above, since it doesn't print, it exports to PDF (I assume).

As I said, it requires Ghostscript and the instructions aren't in English. I can mess around with it but I was hoping for an easier (or more spelled out) solution.

[motorollin]

Sorry didn't see your comment about the instructions not being English. This has got English instructions included in the archive. I haven't used GhostScript for a long time on an Amiga, but ISRT it wasn't that hard to set up.

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moto

[RW222]

idiot wrote:

Can you explain more step by step what this means? Does it work with graphics and fonts?

I'm afraid it's 12 years since I did it last, so real hazy on the specifics. The general principle is however, to choose a postscript capable printer driver. I think LaserJet is one, and Apple Laser Writer is another, not 100% sure though, sorry. Then in the CLI use the pipe command to redirect the output that would normally go to the parallel port to a file. PAR: is the parallel port device. Print from the application, then go back and unset the redirection, then take that file and feed it to a postscript savvy application on the PC such as ghostscript and it should be able to read it, and print it to another printer, postscript or otherwise (Presuming of course you named it as something.ps) The file will have any graphics in it that were printable, as the printer would print them. So if you have color images they will be rendered in grayscale. If you have vector images, you won't be able to extract them in vector format from the .ps file.

I'm real rusty on how to use pipe correctly though. Hopefully someone with a better memory or more recent experience with this will fill in the blanks for you.

[cgutjahr]

@idiot

Unfortunately I can't find a suitable solution to get them off the amiga, short of zooming in and taking 50 million screen shots and piecing them all together.

Finalwriter can export files in the Postscript ("PS") format. If you don't know what PS is, just think of it as a rather old and extremely well documented format that's very similar to PDF.

There are dozens of tools for converting a PS document to PDF, for pretty much every operating system invented by mankind. Ghostscript is probably the most famous of the bunch, but there are more user-friendly alternatives. I'm not familiar with Windows tools, but I'm sure you'll get lots of tips from other people. For a quick start, you can even use one of the online converters available on the net (example: ps2pdf.com).

I never used FW, so I don't know how good Finalwriter's PS export is (i.e. how much of your gfx, fonts, formatting etc. ends up in the PS document), but it is said to be rather good.

Load your document into FW, then change the printer settings to "Postscript" and "Print to file", select a filename for the destination file and print your document (this is more or less how it should work - as I said I don't know FW). You should now have a postscript file that you can easily convert to PDF.

[rkauer]

Another "easy" way is enabling your printer in UAE config... :roll:

And add a postscript printer on the "Amiga" side.

[pVC]

How about saving them as RTF or HTML from FinalWriter? I don't know how exactly those preserve page layouts etc, if they're complicated, but at least there's option for those in "Save as... -> Export" in FW.

[TrevorDick]

I have exactly the same setup with an HPLjet6L attached to my Windoze PC. I have Final Writer 97 installed in my AmiKit WinUae setup. In WinUAE "Game& I/O ports" setings I set the printer to the HPLjet attached to the parallel port. I select the HPLJ6 workbench printer driver in the Amiga printer prefs. All works fine.

TrevorDick

[idiot]

cgutjahr wrote:
@idiot
Finalwriter can export files in the Postscript ("PS") format. If you don't know what PS is, just think of it as a rather old and extremely well documented format that's very similar to PDF.

I never used FW, so I don't know how good Finalwriter's PS export is (i.e. how much of your gfx, fonts, formatting etc. ends up in the PS document), but it is said to be rather good.

Load your document into FW, then change the printer settings to "Postscript" and "Print to file", select a filename for the destination file and print your document (this is more or less how it should work - as I said I don't know FW). You should now have a postscript file that you can easily convert to PDF.

Holy cow this is awesome! Thank you! Exactly what I wanted. I found this site online that converts post script to pdf and it looks perfect.

[idiot]

Strangely though the random Final Writer 97 fancy pants fonts all work perfect, but one (or more?) of the postscript fonts (from final copy 2) don't work at all. In particular something called SoftOldE.

I can live with it, but it's odd the "post script" font won't export to post script :S