ICommander was originally used on mini-computers in the mid-1980's. The primary
method of printing at that time was line printers and dot matrix printers. When
the cost of laser printers started to drop so they were a feasible option in
place of the line printers, ICommander printing adapted by enabling sending out
commands to the laser printers to let them emulate a line printer.
We can still print to laser printers that way and we still support printing to line printers. We have some customers who still prefer the tractor-feed paper used in line printers and will continue to support that option as long as we have customers using them. Some customers switched to laser printers due to cost and availability. Line printers are now more expensive than lasers and low-end dot matrix printers are hard to find.
The normal method of printing on laser printers from ICommander is now what we call Enhanced Printing. It is enhanced in comparison to simply having the lasers emulate a line printer. Report files are still in plain text but are automatically converted to graphical form when printed. Additionally, we have added Enhanced Printing Format options which enable printing with grid and greenbar effects or both.
The development of Enhanced Printing led to development of our own Print Utility in order to make the many new options easily available and to handle many ICommander functions (such as the electronic archiving of reports) directly versus some original kludgy ways of accomplishing.
The conversion of straight text reports to graphical report is automatic due to a sophisticated ICommander program that analyzes each report to insert commands that the Print Wizard software (from Rasmussen Software, Inc.) to which the marked up report is sent understands. The Enhanced Printing Format options rely in part on this conversion but also have Print Wizard markup commands directly embedded in the report text files produced. Try printing the same report first with line-printer format and then using enhanced printing. You will be amazed at what the background ICommander program and Print Wizard can do automatically.
The Enhanced Printing also enabled making several different fonts available, printing logos on invoice and other documents, letterhead on correspondence, signature images on checks, and many other options. We have also started building print programs that actually layout and print forms now with some extended use of the powerful Print Wizard Markup Language.
When there are several shared laser printers on a Local Area Network, it is best to install the Print Wizard Server software on one PC on the network to centralize the graphical printing. The Anziowin Terminal Emulation and Communication that ICommander requires on any Windows PC accessing ICommander on a Linux Server also has Print Wizard built into it. ICommander allows using that facility via Pass-Through printing so no separate software is needed for the graphical printing. If Print Wizard Server is available, users can send most reports to it but may also elect to use the Print Wizard in Anziowin for certain types of printing. A common example is when PDFfactory or other PDF Writer software is available on the user's PC. Setting Anziowin to route any Pass-Through printing to the PDF Writer makes it very simple to convert ICommander graphical reports directly into PDF Files. This is also a useful way for previewing the graphical version of a report.
Note that when the Pass-Through printing is used, the ICommander monospace fonts will need to be installed on the user PC in order to be accessed. This is a simple matter but an easy step to miss. Installing all the ICommander fonts on the user PC is also useful for making them available as the screen fonts in Anziowin. There are typically hundreds of fonts installed on a Windows PC but locating the ones that are monospaced vs proportional can be challenging. The monospaced fonts that ICommander supports include a few that may already be on the user's PC but some other attractive ones that likely will not be.
Proportional fonts are great for word processing but they do not work well for
accounting data where we all expect the columns to line up.