Atari800MacX Help

Printer Emulation



The Printer Tab controls the type of printer emulation that is used for outputting to the P: device from the emulated Atari.  Note, that the P: Patch must be enabled on the Atari System Tab for this tab to be active.

The are four choices for printer emulation, Text Printer, Atari 825, Atari 1020, and Epson FX-80.  The Text printer simply sends the printer output to a text file with optional script processing, while the other three choices emulator a legacy printer, and allow the user to save the printer output in a PDF file.  For information on setting printer options, see the Printer Tab of the Preferences pane.  The current printer can be selected, and preview output opened, by either an entry in the Media Menu or by using the printer area in the Media Status Window.

The legacy printer emulations allow the user to preview what has been printed to the printer so far.  This preview is presented as a pane which drops down from the main emulator window, and is shown below.  Besides previewing the output, there are controls that allow the user to control the emulated printer and output




While the preview is open, the printer is offline, and the main emulator is paused. The printer comes back online when the preview sheet is closed.

The preview shows the printed output on one or more pages of fanfold paper. The length of one page can be chosen in the Printer tab of the Preferences panel, and is 11 inches by default. Two purple triangles, on the left and right hand side of the paper, indicate the "current position"; this is where the next line of output will appear.  Breaks between the pages will appear as dotted lines, simulating the perforations in fanfold paper.  These dotted lines will not appear in the output.

At the bottom of the sheet are several buttons:

Text Printer

The Text Printer is used to send output to a plain text file.  The file will be stored in the default print output directory, which is settable on the Directories Tab of the Preferences window.  The file name will be automatically generated, and will be off the form SPOOL_xxxxx, where xxxxx is a random character string picked by the program/OS.  The file may then be post-processed by a shell command, which is specified on the Printer Tab of the Preferences window.  By default, the text file is opened in TextEdit.

Epson FX-80 Printer

The Epson FX-80 was a very popular printer in the 1980's, and is therefore supported by many Atari programs.
The emulation is intended to support all of the functions of the original printer, such as different character pitches, bold, italic and underlined text, margins, tabs, and graphic modes. It does not support user defined characters however.  It does support proportional printing well, as opposed to the Atari 825 emulation's proportional print support, which is poor.

The technology used by the emulator for text rendering is very different from the technology used in the original Epson. As a result, the characters are somewhat different, but the size and looks of the characters are just like the real thing,

Atari 1020 Printer/Plotter

The Atari 1020 was a unique printer/plotter with color output, which was rare in the day.  The emulation is intended to support all of the functions of the original printer, and even includes the additional ability to change the colors of the 4 pens in the plotter.

Atari 825 Printer

The Atari 825 was on of several standard Atari printers.  It's emulation is included here for use with early programs which might not have had printer driver support for the Epson.  The emulation is intended to support all of the functions of the original printer, however, proportional output on the printer used a spacing which is not easily emulated with modern fonts, so the output appearance is not optimal.  It is strongly suggested to use the Epson emulation for proportional text output instead.