COMMON PROBLEMS 1) MY LASER PRINTER WORKS FINE NORMALLY. HOWEVER, WHEN I USE DOWNLOAD TO SEND A SOFT FONT TO IT, THE FONT IS GARBLED, DOESN'T APPEAR, OR WIERD THINGS HAPPEN. This is a common problem and is usually due to bad hardware! When a soft font is downloaded through a parallel port your printer will be receiving data at the maximum possible speed. If you do not have a printer cable that meets minimum specifications, or if your parallel printer port is marginal the problems mentioned above may occur. For the record: your parallel printer port cable should be 6 feet long or less and made of quality materials. You should NOT have a switch box in series with this cable! If your cable is OK try switching to a different parallel port. These ports are easy to damage with static electricity. They may appear to work- but they fail during high speed transfers. 2) I DOWNLOAD A SOFT FONT AND MAKE IT MY PRIMARY FONT, JUST AS YOUR MANUAL SAYS. IF I COPY FILES TO THE PRINTER THEY PRINT IN THAT FONT. IF I USE MY WORD PROCESSOR I ALWAYS SEEM TO RETURN BACK TO MY DEFAULT INTERNAL FONT (COURIER). The first thing a word processor does, (before printing anything), is to reset the printer. Resetting a laser printer (or the DeskJet) auto- matically causes the printer to return back to the default font, (Courier). The only practical way around this problem is to provide the word processor with a printer driver that tells it how to use soft fonts. 3) WHEN DOWNLOADING A NUMBER OF SOFT FONTS MY PRINTER STOPS WORKING AND DISPLAYS A FLASHING "20" ON THE LCD DISPLAY. You have run out of memory in your printer! If you are sending new fonts to the printer try deleting the old ones before sending the new ones. Switch to the printer control menu in Download, and send the delete all soft fonts command. If the problem still occurs with some regularity you should start looking for a 1 meg memory add on board. 4) THE SOFT FONT ID NUMBERS I ASSIGN WITH DOWNLOAD DO NOT MATCH THE NUMBERS SHOWN ON MY SAMPLE FONT PRINT SHEET. The Soft Font ID numbers assigned by DOWNLOAD can be used to select soft fonts. However, these ID numbers have NO relationship to the numbers displayed on a font print sheet. Font print sheet numbers always start at 1 and go up. Soft font ID numbers can range from 0 - 65,535. There is no way to display a Soft Font ID number on a print sheet. Ignore the numbers shown on these sheets. 5) MY WORD PROCESSOR DOESN'T SEEM TO WORK WELL WITH SOFT FONTS. WHAT CAN I DO? At present, the following word processors will work well with most soft fonts. Note that most of these word processors come with printer drivers that support common soft font sets. (Some of these word processors build their own printer drivers automatically.) WordStar 2000 v3.0, WordStar 5.0, Word 4.0 & 5.0, Word Perfect 4.1 & 5.0, PC Write 2.71 & 3.02. 6) ANYTIME I USE DOWNLOAD TO SEND A FONT OR COMMAND TO MY PRINTER I GET THE "PRINTER NOT READY" MESSAGE. WHAT'S WRONG? Download always checks the status of the parallel printer port before send- ing any fonts or commands to the printer. Download performs this status check by calling a standard BIOS function that is supposed to return infor- mation about printer select, paper level, busy, etc. Some computer BIOSs are not truely IBM compatible and thus return incorrect status. Some printer cables are not wired correctly and thus do the same thing. Some computers hooked to networks also have this problem. The DLCFG program lets you alter Download so that the program no longer pays any attention to parallel printer port status. See the documentation for more information on this option. 6) THE COLORS SCHEME USED BY DOWNLOAD LOOKS TERRIBLE ON MY MACHINE. The Download program comes configured with the one color combination that works on Monochrome, CGA, EGA, & VGA displays. This color combination can be easily modified using the DLCFG program. We highly recommend changing the colors to suit your particular needs. 7) DOWNLOAD TAKES FOREVER TO SEARCH THROUGH MY SOFT FONT DIRECTORY AND LOCATE ALL MY SOFT FONTS. HOW CAN I SPEED THIS UP? The rate at which Download can locate all your soft fonts is dependant on the number of files present in a particular subdirectory AND the wild card used to search for these fonts. If you have 100 files in this subdirectory, of which only 50 are soft fonts, and use the "*.*" wild card- Download must check each file to see if it is a font. This wastes time! Try a wild card like "*.??P" to locate all portrait fonts or "*.??L" to find all landscape ones. This will significantly speed up initial operation. 8) I HAVE ABOUT 150 SOFT FONTS YET DOWNLOAD NEVER SHOWS ME MORE THAN 100 FONTS AT ANY ONE TIME. WHAT GIVES? Download only has room for 100 soft fonts. If you have more than this you will only see the first 100 fonts that Download finds. The 100 font limit keeps the TSR memory requirements small. If you really need to see and use more than 100 fonts and you don't mind allocating extra memory for the program contact us for information concerning custom versions of the program.