Print Wizard and Multivalue

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Print Wizard?

Print Wizard is a family of programs dealing with printing, scanning, faxing, PDF generation, emailing, and document management.

One way to think of Print Wizard is as a set of building blocks. There is a plain text renderer, a PDF generator, a form image processor, a fax generator, a PCL translator, and many more. These building blocks can be combined in many ways to accomplish many tasks.

Print Wizard is not written in Pick BASIC, nor is it used solely in MultiValue installations. However, it fits nicely into the MultiValue market.

What benefits can Print Wizard provide my users?

Print Wizard can provide a wide range of document creation and management capabilities, all controlled by your MV programs.  Examples include:

• Print invoices over a form image on plain paper.
• Generate and email invoices instead of printing.
• Replace multi-part preprinted forms
• Print identical output on ANY printer (no longer worry about what kind of printer the user has)
• Control receipt and label printers
• Auto-fit plain text to the page
• Print international characters
• Scan and store documents
• View documents before (or instead of) printing
• “Go green”

What programs are part of the Print Wizard family?

Print Wizard Server Edition

PWSE makes a Windows machine act as a printer server. It can accept jobs in a variety of ways from other computers or the same computer.

Print Wizard Personal Edition

PWPE is a more limited version that must be launched for each print job.

WēPO – Web Print Object

WēPO is an ActiveX object for use on a web page.

AnzioWin

AnzioWin is our robust terminal emulation client.  It includes the Print Wizard engine for use with passthrough print. (Anzio Lite does not have this feature.)

What platform does Print Wizard run on?

All versions of Print Wizard run on Windows. We recommend Windows XP or later, up through Vista, Server 2008, and Windows 7. When your MV runs on a Linux platform, you send the print jobs to a Print Wizard on a Windows box.

How can I send print jobs from MV to Print Wizard…

…if my MV runs on Windows?

Configure a Windows printer driver to print via “raw TCP/IP” to the IP address of the same or a different PC, wherever Print Wizard is running. Run Print Wizard as a “listen service” on that PC or another networked PC. Or configure the printer driver to use LPD, and run Print Wizard as an LPD service.

Choose as the printer type some kind of HP PCL-5 printer.

…if my MV runs on Linux, and …

…I want to run AnzioWin?

If you configure your MV to do passthrough printing, and you use AnzioWin as your emulator, you can use the Print Wizard engine that is built in.  Just configure this in AnzioWin's Printer Setup dialog.

…I want to run AccuTerm?

Configure your MV to do passthrough printing. Tell AccuTerm to use one of the output scripts for Print Wizard that come with AccuTerm.

…I want to bypass the terminal emulator?

Configure a remote printer on Linux, which goes via LPD to the Windows box, where Print Wizard’s LPD service runs.  Or set up Print Wizard to emulate a JetDirect device.

…if a have a web server front end on my MV?

Embed a Web Print Object (WēPO) in your web page. The user clicks the page, and gets a printout.

How do I make MultiValue do passthrough print to AnzioWin or AccuTerm?

Each MultiValue flavor has a different approach to this.  In some, you can do “SP-ASSIGN AS” to activate built-in support.  In others, you must explicitly send the codes that switch the terminal emulator into and out of passthrough print mode.

What kind of print data can I send to Print Wizard?

Can I send plain text?

Yes. Print Wizard will analyze the data and auto-fit it to the page. It can be configured to automatically switch to landscape orientation for wide-format reports.

Can I send PCL data?

Yes. Print Wizard can understand PCL-5, whether it comes directly from MV or from a printer driver.  It can read the PCL (including HPGL), manipulate the print job, and output it on any printer, fax, PDF, TIF, etc.

Existing report programs should render correctly (if not, send us a sample).  If you currently use a system of preloading PCL macros or fonts, we have a way to deal with that, also.

Or Print Wizard can send the PCL-5 transparently to the printer (assuming the printer can handle it).

Can I send HTML?

Maybe. Print Wizard can understand and handle many elements of HTML.

How can I get more control of Print Wizard’s printing?

Adjust your printing programs to output Print Wizard Markup Language (PWML).  This is similar to HTML, but provides additional capabilities, such as barcode printing, precise placement, rotated text, etc.

Can I send image files?

Yes. Print Wizard can print many kinds of image files, such as .BMP, .PNG, .TIF, etc.  It will print these full-page.

Can I send .DOC, .DOCX, etc., files?

In many cases, yes.  Some forms of Print Wizard have “Smart Print” – Print Wizard will receive the job and pass it off to the appropriate printing program.

Can I send .PDF files?

In current release, Print Wizard will handle these using “Smart Print”; that is, it will invoke Acrobat or Adobe Reader to do the printing. Coming soon, though, Print Wizard will be able to read and print PDFs directly.

What is Print Wizard’s output?

What kind of printers can Print Wizard use?

Print Wizard can output to any Windows-supported printer, even Windows-only printers. It makes thorough use of the printer driver to make output device independent.

What kind of fax engine can Print Wizard use?

Print Wizard can drive the fax engine included with later versions of Windows, including the fax server feature on 2003 or 2008 Server and SBS.

How can Print Wizard generate PDFs?

Print Wizard has a built-in PDF generator. No other software is required. Any of the input formats described above, including PCL-5, can be converted into PDFs.

What kind of PDFs can Print Wizard generate?

Print Wizard makes industry standard PDFs.  These can include:

• Form image backgrounds.  Each one exists only once in the PDF file.
• Title, subject, author, and keywords
• Compression
• Encryption, with owner and user passwords, and usage permissions
• Certification
• Embedded attachments
• An index

How can I control what Print Wizard does…

…as an end user?

Print Wizard (in its various forms) can run in interactive mode, in which it asks the user how to handle each job – what the destination is, whether an overlay should be used, whom to fax to, etc.

…from the Pick program?

Each form of Print Wizard also has various ways for the Pick program to control output options.  In some cases, you control options by choosing different logical printers. In others, you issue commands to configure the emulator.  And in some cases you can embed control commands inside the printfile itself.

How can I eliminate preprinted forms?

Print Wizard can print form images along with the main data.  It can also do this while generating PDFs and faxes.  Form images can be in color.

Where do form images come from?

You can scan an existing paper form to a file, and use that file as an overlay.

You can send that file to Rasmussen Software, and we will convert it from an image to the corresponding lines, boxes, and text, for a fee.

You can take an available PDF file, DOC, etc., file and convert it to a format Print Wizard can use. Coming soon, Print Wizard will be able to directly read a PDF as a form image.

What can Print Wizard do with a scanner?

Print Wizard can control any TWAIN-compatible scanner, either interactively or automatically, to read images as primary documents, overlays, or attachments.

How can Print Wizard email?

Print Wizard can control any TWAIN-compatible scanner, to scan single sheets or multiple-page documents.

Scanning can be interactive, so the user can choose options such as color, density, etc.  Or Print Wizard can control all aspects of the scanning, so the user is not involved.

Scanned documents can be immediately printed, emailed, or faxed.

Scanned documents can be stored as PDFs, multi-page TIFs, BMPs, etc.  They can be stored on any disk drive visible to Windows.  Scanner control sheets can direct Print Wizard to separate jobs, and/or switch between color, gray, and monochrome.

Scanned documents can be used as form images, or attached to emails or faxes.

How can Print Wizard email?

Print Wizard interacts with Windows components to allow emailing several ways, including via Outlook, SMTP, SMTP with SSL, MAPI, and more.

Typically, a print job from MV will be rendered to PDF and then attached to an email.

Emailing can be done with some user involvement, or totally automatically.

Emails can go to one recipient or many. They can include additional files as attachments.

How is Print Wizard licensed?

This varies greatly depending on the kind of Print Wizard you need, which depends on your computing environment.  Please see details online, or contact us.

Is a demo version available?

Yes.  If you download a demo from the web site it will operate for 60 days.  Purchase a license and enter it, and the demo becomes a live version.

What support is available?

Basic support before or after purchase is free. Implementation assistance, customization, problem analysis, etc., are available on an hourly basis.

Where can I get more information?

Visit http://www.anzio.com
Email rsi@anzio.com
Telephone 503-624-0360

If you have any questions on the above information, feel free to call or email us at rsi@anzio.com .