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October 2002 [Newsletter Index] [Previous Page] [Next Page] [Feature Index] editor@os2voice.org

Letters, Addenda, Errata

Christian, go read this article. There is some info on Mandrake and OS/2

Moving OS/2 to a New Drive - http://www.os2ezine.com/20020116/page_6.html

Thanks to Thomas Klein for an excellent article (VOICE newsletter, September 2002) on DrDialog. I agree, this is the tool that everyone needs to get started on OS/2 programming. I used it for my very first PM applications, and it was incredibly easy. You need to learn Rexx as you're going, but this is just a matter of flipping between the DrDialog help and the Rexx manual. One side-effect of this is that I now know how to use Rexx for command-line applications as well.

Here's a tip for people who are NOT using Rexx for their application development. I use Modula-2 for most of my own programming, but I am still using DrDialog as my resource editor. It's a lot more user-friendly than the standard IBM resource editor. Something that most people don't realise it, until they've tried it, is that a lot of DrDialog is language-neutral, i.e. the resource editing part can be used in conjunction with your favourite programming language, whatever that happens to be.

Congratulations on an excellent issue . I will certainly renew my membership at Warpstock. I have but one small suggestion involving printability. I'm one of those who would rather sit in a comfortable place in the shade and read rather than study on a screen. Any attempt to directly print an article (OS/2 Webbrowser, Epson 3000, Epomni driver, tractor feed) results in serious croping of the images, either on the right side, or at pagination, even though the word wrap is fine. I can of course download the entire issue as an inf file and print using NewView, but this is a bit tedious. Would it be possible to have a link for each article to its inf file? PDF would be even better, since I could then print on both sides of a page and cut the paper consumption in half.

In any case, great issue!

Thanks. FWIW I have this same issue (saw it again when I printed out an article from OS/2 eZine today). I think it's Netscape's lack of ability to properly format for print. I haven't tried it in Mozilla or Opera yet, so there may be different results there. StarOffice, however, does a much better job of formatting the output.

The problem with printing images is probably because some of the images are larger than the page.

As to a separate INF file for each article, I'm sorry, but we won't be able to help you much. Making an INF file for each article would be too much work and IMO also rid the INF version of its benefits (searchability and so on). As for PDF, I have tried that a few times. I was able to produce some more or less decent results with HTMLDOC (a HTML to PDF converter), but the problems with images of too large a size remain. The only way would be to resize the images, which in turn would often result in too low quality. E.g. menus and the like would be barely readable. In fact, the only way to achieve a satisfactory result would be if the authors submitted images at the right size. We can try and ask them for this in the future. This won't help with images "wrapped" around the end of a page, though.

As for images "wrapped" at the page end: we could only avoid that by producing a special print version with a DTP program, StarOffice, or SmartSuite or the like. This is an awful amount of work and unless anyone volunteers to do it, I'm afraid I don't see it happening as most of the staff are already donating more time for the Newsletter than we have to spare actually.

As a workaround, you can try loading the pages into StarOffice or Smartsuite and rearranging the images yourself.

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