#: 12004 S10/OS9/6809 (CoCo)
    28-Aug-91  17:44:46
Sb: #11983-DS-69B
Fm: Lee Veal 74726,1752
To: Mike Haaland 72300,1433 (X)

Mike,

I use the Epson driver, even on my Citizen Printer.  The other printer that I
use is a 'real' Epson FX-1050.  The problem of squashing/unsquashing seems to
be unrelated to the print problem.  (One of my previous messages appears to
have gotten squashed itself, making it look like I was saying that the two
problems were connected.  As aar as I can tell, they're not.)
   And I haven't noticed any differences in the printing problem between
printing from the MVCanvas menu or directly from a command line using PRTDMP.

   Here's a more detailed explanation of what appears to be happening.

   The squashing/unsquashing problem seems to have a tendency to clobber RAM. 
If I deal only with unsquashed .VEF files then I don't have any problems with
RAM being stepped on.  However, if I deal with squashed .VEF files, then I
generally get my RAM stepped on.  The system doesn't completely crash, usually
I can still switch from window to window using the  key.  If I try to do
anything on the GSHELL+ screen, like refresh the screen by clicking on the
directory bar, I find that some of the font area has been clobbered as well as
the location in RAM where the icons and mouse pointers are stored.  That in
itself is pretty weird, because if the mouse pointers have been clobbered, then
I shouldn't be able to see it on the GSHELL+ screen in order to place it on the
Directory bar in order to refresh the screen display.  Makes me wonder if just
some address pointers are getting corrupted somehow.  When I load a squashed
VEF file the mouse pointers on the MVCanvas dosappear, too.
   Things go down hill from there.  When GSHELL+ redisplays the directory, the
icons are gone, the file names still display but the icons don't appear on the
screen anymore.

---------------

The printing problem appears to happen when there's a lot of dithering on the
screen.  If I use colors other than black and white, the MVC PRTDMP program
tries to simulate those colors by dithering the output.  That forced dithering
seems to cause the printer to jump about skewing lines, sometimes even dropping
out of graphics mode and printing double wide,