NewDeal Technical Support Document 259

PRINT TO FILE

Creating output files for printers, fax modems, and other programs

Note: This support document is about NewDeal software. You must have NewDeal software in order to use NewDeal print drivers.

Using NewDeal software's print to file feature you can create a file that can be faxed or displayed by other software programs, or you can print on a printer at a remote location that does not have NewDeal software installed. You can even take your output files to a local copy shop to get high quality color documents.

Setting up NewDeal software to print to file for faxing from a DOS or Windows fax software

Note: Starting with Release 3, NewDeal includes fax support for most common faxmodems.
  1. Find out if your fax software can send files formatted for a specific printer. The manual for your fax software will tell you what file formats are supported.
  2. In NewDeal Preferences click on the Printer button. Click on the New button. Choose the printer whose format your fax software supports. Under the Port section, scroll down until you see the "To File" selection. Click on To File. This sets up NewDeal to always print to a file when you select this printer.
  3. Click on OK to install the printer. Click on Close to exit the Printer dialog box.
  4. Close Preferences by choosing Exit from the File menu, or by double clicking on the Close Box in the upper left corner.

Printing on a remote PostScript printer

You can print your NewDeal documents to a PostScript file, which can then be printed on any PostScript compatible printer. Most desktop publishing services and service bureaus have PostScript compatible color laser printers available for customers to use.
  1. Using NewDeal Preferences, install the PostScript print driver corresponding to the printer on which you intend to print. If you are going to an outside agency, follow their advice about which driver to install. (Note: The version numbers next to the driver names in Preferences refer to versions of PostScript.)
  2. After creating the document, Open the File menu and choose Print. If the correct print driver is not displayed, click on the list to choose it. Click the Options button. Click to choose the "File" option under "Print to:". Click OK.
  3. When you click the "Print to File" button, another dialog box will appear asking where on your hard drive you wish to place the file and what you would like to name it. The default filename is UNNAMED.RAW. The default directory is your Document folder. We recommend that you print the file to your hard drive. You can copy it to a floppy disk afterwards using NewManager, if you wish. If you need help copying files, please consult your manual.
  4. To print the file, simply copy it to the printer port. That is, if the PostScript printer is attached to the standard printer port, LPT1, and your file is on a floppy diskette in the A drive, you would enter this command at the DOS prompt:
    COPY A:UNNAMED.RAW /B
The file can be sent or taken to a print shop for PostScript printing. Almost every print shop can print this file, but you may want to ask the print shop to print a test page just to make sure it can handle the PostScript file from our software before attempting a large project on a deadline.

There have been unconfirmed reports that our PostScript print to file adds a non-ASCII character at the very end of the file that causes some printers to complain. If it's true, then one work around is to text-edit the file and remove the offending character.

Where's my file?

When you print to file, if the file does not immediately show up in NewManager, try clicking on Rescan Drives in the Disk menu.
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Last Modified 17 Feb 1999