Known Users


Known Users

Paperless Printing



Author: Kevin Savetz
Date: October, 1993
Keywords: printer Nine to Five software program review utility
Text: This is the beginning of the end for paper airplane pilots. The end is near. Do not plan on creating any more origami with botched printouts. Alas, that blank sheet your printer spews won't be used for building a swan, or a paper fortune teller. Paperless Printer is a utility that means to put an end to our paper-wasting fun, and save a few million trees, too. Paperless Printer (PP) is a tool for sending print jobs to a disk file instead of to a printer. When the resultant file is viewed, it looks just like a printout would, complete with text formatting, graphics, and color. You can view the document onscreen, search for text, mark pages, and do just about anything except ball it up and recycle it. PP works by combining two parts, a ''chooser extension'' that handles the print jobs when you select ''print'' from an application, and a viewer utility. The chooser extension fools the computer into thinking it's printing a document - but it's actually saving it to disk. Instead of printing a report on paper, you can pop the file on a floppy and hand it to your boss/teacher/loan shark. She or he can then view the document on his or her Mac. The viewer utility, which allows you to read a paperless printout, is necessary to do searches and other advanced functions. However, the viewer may not be distributed legally - so, if you know that your recipient does not own PP, you may make your document a self-displaying application that lacks some of the advanced viewing features. Of course, you could also put the paperless printout on a network, upload it to a BBS, or (as Nine-to-Five software did) use paperless documentation - saving paper, money and time. The more complicated the document, the more disk space it takes, but file sizes are generally small. A 15-page text-only document uses about 50KB. Printing and viewing documents is surprisingly fast - much faster than printing to a real printer. Using the full-featured viewer, you can easily change the fonts and text size of the document, password protect and encrypt documents - these features won't work with the self-displaying viewer. PP doesn't work perfectly all of the time, however. The manual lists about a dozen incompatibilities and quirky problems with various applications (including Excel, AutoDoubler, and Canvas.) When I printed from PageMaker, the pages in the paperless document were consistently printed last-to-first, although I didn't have this problem with other applications. While viewing a large document heavy on graphics, entire pages were missing, replaced with ''Unable to read page.'' One interesting (although possibly distracting) feature of PP is the print dialog box, which, along with the usual ''print range'' choices, always includes an ''eco-tip.'' It seems to change every time you print. (Did you know you should take your own coffee cup to work with you to save on plastic cups? Did you know only 10% of lube oil is recycled?) Paperless Printer is a good product and a great idea. But I still haven't figured out how to make a Paperless Airplane. Nine to Five Software PO Box 18899 Boulder, CO 80308-1899 303-443-9713

Copyright © october, 1993 by Kevin Savetz


Return to:
Known Users archive