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Mick Sutton and Robert Williams find out if the latest release of Turbo Print can help them get more from their printers.

If you want to use a modern printer on your Amiga, the supplied workbench printer drivers just cannot cut the mustard. You can find PD drivers for most printers that will do an adequate job of printing text, however if you wish to output high quality graphics then you will have to part with some cash and purchase a commercial printing package. Turboprint is one such package and version 7, that we are looking at here, has just recently been released.

So what do you get for your money? First and foremost the whole Workbench printer system is effectively replaced by one that supports modern printers. Graphics Publisher is an application that allows you to print all your graphics in simple layouts. Turbospool is a utility that queues print jobs whilst the printer is busy. And finally Ghostscript, which allows 24 bit printing from many applications that support postscript.

Installation

Turboprint-The Driver

Turboprint on the other hand supports most up to date printers and can print in 24 bit (16 million colours) or 256 greyscales. This is achieved by replacing the printer device (in memory not on disk), so Turboprint receives the data when applications print. Unfortunately, applications not designed with Turboprint in mind only send the 4096 colour data for the normal Workbench drivers, however Turboprint still manages to get far better results than the Workbench system.

Turboprefs replaces the Workbench printer preferences programs while TurboPrint is active, and provides far more control over the print than the standard prefs. This includes an option to choose the type of media you are going to print on, ranging from standard copier paper through to inkjet paper, glossy paper to speciality media like OHP film. You can also choose the resolution you will print at, as TurboPrint supports the full range available on any particular printer. One very useful feature is that you can set up several different drivers at once, so if you have several printers or several sets of options you commonly use, you can define and name each one and then simply pick it from a list when it's needed. Although there are lots of options you can set within TurboPrefs, the default settings supplied are excellent. In most cases you simply need to pick the type and size of paper and resolution you want, then TurboPrint does the rest. Unless you have a very particular application in mind you will probably find you will not have to change most of the other settings, however if there is something out of the ordinary you need then there are loads of options such as different dither patterns, colour correction, and smoothing. Other features include built in poster printing, and screen dumping.

Graphics Publisher

Another great feature is the PhotoOptimize function that can be applied to an image, which is designed to get the absolute best quality from photographic images, in particular skin tones. Besides doing a great job simply printing pictures and photos, Graphics Publisher also has some limited DTP facilities that make it ideal for many print jobs where images are the main content. You can add multi-line text boxes to the page that can use any Compugraphic font installed in your Fonts: drawer. Although all the text in the box must be in the same font and size you can have as many boxes as you like. You can then give the text, the box background, and outline different colours (or leave them transparent). One useful feature is that you can change the dimensions of the box independently of the text (I`ve found this useful for making cassette and CD covers).

Once you have got a layout set-up as you want it Graphics Publisher allows you to save it, yet this does not save the images into a huge file, just the layout information and a pointer to each image so they can be re-loaded. You can use the saved file as a template by simply selecting the image you want to replace and choosing Load... from the Picture menu, GP will then place the new image in the same position as the old one (after asking you if you want to replace it).

Although it doesn't have an AREXX port, Graphics Publisher accepts some options when run from a shell that enables you to automate printing a single image. You can specify the size of the print and if it is centred. Unfortunately, you cannot choose an exact position.

Ghostscript

Even with TurboPrint installed the best quality prints can only be obtained when printing from programs that specifically support TurboPrint. The reason behind this is that programs designed with the original AmigaOS printer system in mind do not pass 24bit data to the printer device (because it does not support 24bit printing). Turboprint is very good at making the most of the data that is sent and achieves far better results than the standard drivers but it still can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

There are a few programs, including Graphics Publisher, Photogenics and DrawStudio that can use TurboPrint directly and thus output at full quality, but the vast majority of applications do not. In version 7 Irseesoft have come up with a very cunning solution to this problem which uses the postscript output which most professional applications have. TP7 comes bundled with Ghostscript which is a freeware postscript interpreter that has the capability of rendering postscript files to 24bit bitmap data. Turboprint then takes this 24bit data and prints it at the highest quality. Instructions on setting up several popular applications (PageStream, Final Writer, Wordworth etc.) to print using this method are supplied but it is very simple to use. Ghostscript uses a device called PS: and is set-up to print, via TurboPrint, any postscript file sent to that device.

Anyone who has tried to install Ghostscript manually will know it's quite a job but the TP implementation is simplicity itself. Being all part of the main installer all you have to do is choose where you want to put it. Configuration is then carried out on a new PS page in the TurboPrefs program and any prints sent to PS: use the paper size, quality, and other settings from TurboPrefs too. Because most applications send 24bit data to Postscript printers the quality of the printouts is much improved. In my case I can now print brilliantly from PageStream 3 to my new HP Deskjet. As with the standard printing the Ghostscript method can only print what is sent by the application, and Wordworth causes a problem because it only seems to send greyscale image data to postscript (presumably assuming a Postscript printer will be a black and white laser), so all images come out in shades of grey. However, the postscript method does work well with many programs.

Conclusion

Results

Pros Fantastic output quality Supports a wide range of printers Powerful Graphics Publisher