Printer's Apprentice 7.5 FAQ

If you are a registered user of Printer's Apprentice 6.5 or 7.0, the upgrade will be free. You can get the software from our download page.

However, your registration key from PA 6.5/7.0 will not work with 7.5. We will be emailing new registration keys to users in our database during Fall 2002. If you have not received your key, you can use our Request Form to get one.

If you are a registered user of PA 6.1, 6.0 or earlier, the upgrade will cost $12. We will deliver via email a registration key so you can "unlock" the downloaded copy of Printer's Apprentice. To get your registration key, send a check payable to Lose Your Mind Development, P.O. Box 184, Berwyn, PA 19312-0184. If you have questions about the upgrade, send email to salesinfo@loseyourmind.com.

If you are a registered user of Printer's Apprentice 6.5 or 7.0, the upgrade will be free. You can get the software from our download page.

However, your registration key from PA 6.5/7.0 will not work with 7.5. We will be emailing new registration keys to users in our database during Fall 2002. If you have not received your key, you can use our Request Form to get one.

If you are a registered user of PA 6.1, 6.0 or earlier, the upgrade will cost $12. We will deliver via email a registration key so you can "unlock" the downloaded copy of Printer's Apprentice. To get your registration key, send a check payable to Lose Your Mind Development, P.O. Box 184, Berwyn, PA 19312-0184. If you have questions about the upgrade, send email to salesinfo@loseyourmind.com.

Please see the Printer's Apprentice Product Sheet for information regarding new features. A list of changes in the development version can be found in this text file changes.txt.

Printer's Apprentice does support Type 1 (T1) and OpenType (OTF) fonts. However, that support is based on the operating system. Use the chart below to determine what features are available based on your OS.

Why are most Type 1 and OpenType functions not available on Windows 95/98/Me? If Adobe Type Manager is installed, Printer's Apprentice uses its published Application Programing Interface (API) to handle the previewing and font management functions for Type 1 and OpenType fonts. Under Windows 9x, Adobe Type Manager is implemented as a 16 bit application. Printer's Apprentice is a 32 bit application. A 32 bit application cannot call a 16 bit application without a complex translation layer. This is also called a thunking layer. We are investigating ways to add 16 bit support in a future version.

Printer's Apprentice includes an uninstaller that can remove the software from your computer. This includes deleting both application and system files, INI files, removing directories and Start menu items. To run the uninstaller, select "Uninstall Printer's Apprentice" from the PA group on your Start menu. The uninstaller will ask you if you wish to use Automatic or Custom modes. We suggest using the Custom mode so you can review files and other items that will be deleted.

Follow the instructions below to manually uninstall Printer's Apprentice -

1. Delete the Printer's Apprentice folder.
2. Delete the Printer's Apprentice group in your Start Menu.

If needed, Printer's Apprentice does install the VB 6.0 (SP5) runtime libraries. We recommend leaving these files installed as other applications may be using them.

If you have an idea for Printer's Apprentice, please feel free to forward it to one of the addresses in the Technical Support section. All requests are carefully evaluated for possible use in upcoming versions. If more information is needed, we will get in touch with you, so please include your contact information.

There is currently no version of Printer's Apprentice for the Macintosh. You might want to take a look at Suitcase from Extensis.

We strive to produce the best software possible. However, problems can and do occur. In order to help you quickly, you need to provide as much information about the situation as possible. Otherwise we will not be able to help you.

Please use our web based information form when contacting us bout a problem with Printer's Apprentice.

Again, we can't stress how important it is to include as much information as possible. Thank you!

To fix this error, you need to download an updated version of the Windows Common Controls. Download and install COM32UPD.EXE from Microsoft. Then restart Printer's Apprentice.

If the software hangs or crashes on startup, please try the following

• Shut down your computer, then reinstall Printer's Apprentice.
• Make sure the Arial Truetype font is installed. If Arial is not installed, PA 7.11 and earlier will crash on startup with an "Invalid Page Fault" error. With PA 7.12 and later, you need to have either Arial, Verdana or MS Sans Serif installed.
• If the software still does not run, you need to enable a special "logging" features of Printer's Apprentice. This will create a log file to send to our Technical Support people. This log file will help us determine the source of the problem.

To enable the startup log

1. Open the Printer's Apprentice folder with Windows Explorer. This is usually c:\program files\printers apprentice
2. Locate the PA.INI file and double click it. The file will be opened in Notepad.
3. Find the line that reads LOGGING = 0.
4. Edit the line so it reads LOGGING = 1.
5. Save and close the file.
6. Start Printer's Apprentice.
7. After it crashes, locate the PALOG.TXT file in your Printer's Apprentice folder.
8. Send this file to helpdesk@loseyourmind.com. Also, please detail the contents of any messages that are displayed when you try to run Printer's Apprentice.

One printer used in development was a Hewlett Packard LaserJet 5L. Like many low end printers, this model only has 1MB of memory. Because Printer's Apprentice often builds complex pages made up of many different fonts, it is easy to send too much data to the printer and get a Memory Overflow error. Changing the printer settings will often get around this problem. Listed below are settings for an HP 5L or similar printer that can affect printing.

Resolution - Printing at 600 DPI takes much more memory than 300 DPI. Lower your resolution to use less memory when printing.

Graphics Mode - On many HP printers, you can send graphics as Raster images. According to the HP help files, complex pages will print faster in graphics mode.
Text Mode - Most HP drivers give you the option of sending text as a bitmapped soft font or as a graphic. It is our experience that sending Text as Graphics greatly enhances the ability of Printer's Apprentice to send multiple pages of fonts to the printer.

You can find these settings by opening the Printers folder from the Windows Control Panel. Right click on your HP icons and select Properties. Click the Print Quality tab. Click "Manual Settings", then the Settings button. Your driver may have the settings located differently then the HP 5L driver. Please note, these instructions are for the HP 5L and other HP printers. If you have an HP compatible printer, there is a "Print TrueType as Graphics" option buried in the various printer settings dialog boxes.

Printer's Apprentice also has an option to reset the printer every few pages. Basically, Printer's Apprentice will break a large print job into several smaller jobs. Each smaller job is made of a user definable number of pages. To change the default, open the Font Catalogs tab in the Options dialog. If you are having difficulties printing more than a few pages with the software, please contact us for technical support.

The number of fonts reported by Windows in the status bar of the Fonts folder is the number of font families installed. This includes TrueType, Adobe Type 1 and selected "device" fonts. A font family defined as a group of similar fonts. For example, "Arial" is a font family. This family might include four individual fonts, such as Arial Roman, Arial Bold, Arial Italic and Arial Bold. Depending on the print driver installed, the number reported by Printer's Apprentice may or may not include device fonts such as MS Sans Serif, MS Serif, fixedsys, etc.

Not all fonts found online and on CD-ROM collections are valid font files. Fonts can get corrupted by being run through conversion utilities, being transferred from other operating systems, etc. Invalid fonts can crash the Windows TrueType font engine. If you get this error, you should reboot Windows and delete or avoid using this font. For more information, see Known Issues.

Depending on how you have your printer driver setup, fonts can go to the printer as downloaded softfonts, bitmapped fonts or plain bitmaps. Either way, fonts take up lots of space. Newer Windows print drivers have memory compression built in, causing less data to be sent to the printer.

The print drivers are also smart enough to send only the font characters used by the document. But the sample sheets sent by Printer's Apprentice frequently use all characters in the font, so there is a great deal of information being sent to the printer. We strongly recommend lowering your resolution from 600 dpi to 300 dpi. This cuts the amount of data being sent to the printer while retaining the detail in the fonts.

If a font displays incorrectly or with big, blocky pixels, you might have a entry in the Registry for the font, but the physical font TTF file is missing. This could happen for any number of reasons. To fix the problem, you can do a few things.

Reinstall the font

1. Using the Windows Explorer, locate a backup copy of the font.
2. Drag it into the Windows Fonts folder. This will force Windows to recopy the TTF file to the fonts folder.

-- or --

Remove the Registry entries for the font

1. Select Font Registry from the Tools menu.
2. Registry entries that point to non-existent font files are marked with a red symbol.
3. Open the Windows Registry editor (regedit.exe) and navigate to one of the following keys "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Fonts" under Windows 98/98 or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts under Windows NT.
4. Use the Registry editor to remove any entries that point to TTF files that don't exist.

Printer's Apprentice requires several OCX and DLL files to be installed in the windows\system (Win95/98) or winnt\system32 (NT) folder. The Printer's Apprentice setup program copies these files for you. All of our support files are produced by Microsoft. We always include the most recent version of these files when our software is compiled and shipped.

When our setup program runs, it will not overwrite any newer files that already exist on your machine. It is important to note that "newer" does not mean date. Most DLL, OCX, VDX, EXE and other Windows binary files contain an internal version stamp. We use the version stamps to determine if an existing file is older than a file to be installed. Using Windows, you can view the version stamp for a binary file:

To view internal version information

1. In Windows Explorer, right click an EXE, DLL or OCX file.
2. Select "Properties" from the pop up menu.
3. In the Properties dialog, click the Version tab. The internal version information is listed here.

However, other applications may overwrite existing DLL and OCX files with older versions. If Printer's Apprentice fails to start or crashes, this may be the cause of the problem. The best idea is to reinstall the software. If this does not work, you should manually check that all support files are installed. However, duplicate OCX/DLL files can also cause problems. Follow these steps to confirm all support files are correctly installed if Printer's Apprentice won't start.

1. Close all applications and reboot your computer.
2. Open the readme.txt file located in the Printer's Apprentice folder.
3. At the bottom of the file is a list of support DLL and OCX files used by our software. These files are all shipped with our software. The version number for each DLL/OCX file is also noted.
4. Using Windows Explorer, locate the first file in the windows\system folder. Make sure the internal version stamp is the same or newer than what is listed in the PA readme.txt file.
5. If the file does not exist, reinstall Printer's Apprentice.
6. If the file does exist, make sure there is not a copy in your Windows folder as well.
7. If the file is located in both the windows and windows\system folders, keep the one with most recent version number and store it in the windows\system folder.
8. Follow steps 3 through 7 for each DLL/OCX listed in the readme.txt file.

The rule of thumb is as follows - You should have only one copy of each DLL and OCX on your system. These files need to be stored in the windows\system folder. The version of each file needs to be the same as or later than the version number listed in our readme.txt file.

If you need any help with this, don't hesitate to drop us an email at helpdesk@loseyourmind.com.

Reducing the number of fonts installed can increase your startup speed. If you want to clean out all fonts on your system, here is a list of fonts you generally should not remove.

• Marlette - This is the font used for the minimize, maximize and close buttons on your window borders. Don't remove this!
• Arial (TrueType)
• Times New Roman (TrueType)
• Courier New (TrueType)
• Any .FON files. These are fixed size fonts used for MS-DOS windows and some dialog boxes.

Microsoft has an excellent page at http://www.microsoft.com/typography that lists what fonts ship with various projects from the company.

In some cases, Printer's Apprentice does show "unknown" for fonts. This usually happens when a software setup program installs fonts and enters the incorrect entry in the Registry. PA reads installed fonts from memory using a Windows API call. It then tries to make a connection with the registry entry to determine the font name.

For example, "Arial" is installed. The registry entry is "Arial (TrueType)". Sometimes a software setup program will make the registry entry "Arial (True Type)" - note the space in "TrueType". Our software allows for this, but often the difference is significant.

For example the font name might be "Arial MT" but the Registry entry is "Arial (TrueType)" - without the MT. The error happens when there is miscommunication between the developers and setup program writers. If the developers give the setup program writers an incorrect list of font registry entries to make, then we get problems.

There is a solution:

1. Open the Fonts window in Windows Controls Panel.
2. Select two or three of the 47 fonts that list as "unknown" in PA. Drag them from the window to the Desktop. This essentially uninstalls them.
3. Wait a few moments.
4. Drag the fonts from the Desktop back into the Fonts window. This reinstalls the fonts. Windows will write the correct Registry entries for the fonts.
5. Start Printer's Apprentice and see if the font file names are now listed correctly.

By default, Printer's Apprentice launches the Adobe Type Manager 4.x program file. If you a different version installed, you need to point Printer's Apprentice your Adobe Type Manager program file. To do this, follow these steps -

1. Launch Printer's Apprentice.
2. From the Tools menu, select Options.
3. On the "General" tab, click the "..." button next to the ATM Path field.
4. Locate the Adobe Type Manager program file installed on your computer.
5. Save your changes by clicking the "OK" button on the Options screen.