COMMON PROBLEMS 1) My laser printer normally works just fine. However, when I use TSR Download to send a soft font to it, the font is garbled, doesn't appear, or weird 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 must receive 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 fine normally but then 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 most word processors do, (before printing anything), is to reset the printer. Resetting a laser printer (or the DeskJet) automatically causes the printer to return back to the default font, (Courier). The only practi- cal 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 work- ing and displays a flashing "20" on the LCD display. You have run out of memory in your printer! If you are send- ing new fonts to the printer try deleting the old ones before sending any more new ones. Switch to the printer con- trol menu in TSR 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 TSR Download do not match the numbers shown on my sample font print sheet. The Soft Font ID numbers assigned by TSR 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 the TSR Download Soft Font ID number on a print sheet. Ignore the ID 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 proces- sors 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 & 5.5, Word 4.0 & 5.0, Word Perfect 4.1 & 5.0, PC Write 2.71 & 3.02. 6) Anytime I use TSR Download to send a font or command to my printer I get the "PRINTER NOT READY" message. TSR Download always checks the status of the parallel printer port before sending any fonts or commands to the printer. Download performs this status check by calling a standard BIOS function that is supposed to return informa- tion about printer select, paper level, busy, etc. Some com- puter BIOSs are not truly IBM compatible and thus return in- correct status. Some printer cables are not wired correctly and thus do the same thing. Some computers hooked to net- works also have this problem. The DLCFG program lets you al- ter TSR Download so that the program no longer pays any at- tention to parallel printer port status. See the documenta- tion for more information on this option. 6) The color scheme used by TSR Download looks terrible on my machine. The TSR Download program comes configured with the one color combination that works on Monochrome, CGA, EGA, & VGA dis- plays. This color combination can be easily modified using the DLCFG program. We highly recommend changing the colors to suit your particular needs. 7) TSR 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 TSR Download can locate your soft fonts is dependent on the number of files present in the 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- TSR 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 TSR Download never shows me more than 100 fonts at any one time. TSR Download only has room for 100 soft fonts. If you have more fonts than this you will only see the first 100 fonts that the program finds. The 100 font limit keeps the 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 an expanded version of the program. We have a 200 or 300 fonts version available for an additional $15. Each additional 100 soft fonts require 4200 bytes of memory. 9) I have 55 soft fonts in my subdirectory, yet TSR Download only displays 51 of them. A number of public domain soft fonts have incorrect font headers. TSR Download checks each font file to make sure it has a valid soft font header. (This is how the program avoids listing other programs in its font display.) If you have a number of public domain soft fonts some of them may be bad. This is why TSR Download does not display them. 10) I downloaded 35 soft fonts to my printer. Yet TSR Download displays only 32 of them and my laser printer font test sheet also only shows 32 fonts. All HP LaserJet printers (with the exception of the HP 2000) limit you to 32 soft font. Since the printers will not hold more than 32 soft fonts, TSR Download will only display 32 soft fonts. Also note that you can not print with more than 16 fonts on any given page.