CompuServe Thread

Hi Rick, I have The Advantage, and I'll try to answer your questions. However, I'm not altogether sure what you want to know. Advantage uses the default printer settings for most printing. It appears to go through the PRT: device, since it will do bold, italics, and underlining. From that standpoint, it looks quite nice. It prints fairly speedily, too, unless you ask it to print sideways. That takes a looong time, so I just limit the printable portion of my sheets to no wider than my paper (usually 80 columns). My gripes with the printing are that it's WYSINQWYG (i.e., What You See Is Not Quite What You Get). While it is possible to make text and/or numbers in adjacent columns butt together without spaces on the screen, you can't do it on the printer. Advantage *insists* on putting a space between columns. This can play hob with formatting, especially if there's no mention of it in the docs (which there isn't). It's livable, once you know about it, but it is certainly annoying. Another minor gotcha is "center-aligned" print. On the screen, characters in one line can be shifted horizontally by half a character. Since the program uses the default printer fonts, this can't be done on the printer. (Well, it could, I think, given the capability in the printer. Mine has it, but I'm not sure how to use it.) This is really easy to live with, though, and doesn't bother me much at all. The major problem is with the number of columns and lines. It seems to be getting size info from Preferences, but what it's doing with that information is a mystery. I've had to change Prefs to 90 columns in order to get printout that uses all 80 columns of my paper. Otherwise Advantage insists on doing a word wrap of the line! Arrghhhhh!! I run a MoreRow'd screen that's 83 columns wide. Subtract 2 for the scroll bar, and five for the row numbering column, and your left with 76 columns visible on the screen. This should be printable without resorting to funny tricks in [ MORE ]

[ continuation ] Preferences, IMO. Printout length has similar problems. The program sticks a blank line or two at the top of the page, then skips to the next page at about line 55. (I haven't counted this, so I may be a bit off. It leaves *lots* of blank space at the bottom, anyway.) I have to tweak Preferences to get that to come out the way I want it, too. Grrr…. (Sheesh! Long-winded, ain't I?) This posting probably comes out sounding like The Advantage is the worst program since MaxiPlan 1.0, but really it isn't. If you can get around the gotchas in the page sizing and such like, it really looks quite nice. Not quite what was on the screen, perhaps, but not bad at all. Hope this helps. –dds