PFconfig is a program which allows you to fully configure PROforma. The main use is for adding printer drivers or fonts to your system, selecting what the default printer driver is, and to allow you to configure the printable area for your printer.
PFconfig automatically reads the normal config file for PROforma, which is used when your system is booted. When you make a change, then it is effective immediately. You then also get the possibility to make sure the changes you made will also be effective the next time your system boots up.
When PFconfig starts, you have a few options of things which can change. When you indicate such an item or press the first letter of the description, then you can change that aspect of your PROforma configuration. The item to make the changes permanent is only available when something has been changed.
You can add new printer, picture and bitmap drivers using this option. A fileselect window will be displayed. In this window you can indicate all the files you want to add in your system.
When you want to save the changes made in this option, then the directory will be added in the searchpath for the drivers, and the drivers themselves are added to the list of drivers. PFconfig will make sure that there are no drivers which are loaded twice and that directories don't occur twice in the searchpath.
Please note that a different driver may be loaded than expected if drivers with the same filename occur in several directories which are in the searchpath for drivers.
This allows you to configure a printer driver so that the margins on the page are as small as possible without using extra paper, and that the coordinates on screen match the coordinates on paper.
To start, you have to indicate the printer driver which has to be configured. Configurations are always for all the resolutions which are available in one printer driver, so we advice you to choose the highest resolution driver which is available, so as to prevent duplication and overwriting.
When you have selected the printer driver which is to be configured, you get a window which display the name of the driver, the default printing device and the page size which is read from the driver. Unfortunately, PFconfig is not capable of determining what the default device is. To aid you, you can choose the unit which is to be used as metric for the page size and the width of the margins.
At the bottom of the window there are also two rows of items. The first row indicates some default paper size which can be used to set the paper size (and clear the margins). This can be useful when trying to determine the proper settings.
At the bottom row you get some extra items. Get can be used to re-read the current settings from the printer driver. It acts as some kind of cancel. You can also set the imageable area and default driver of the printer driver to the values which are indicated int he window. The try item allows you to test the current configuration of the printer driver.
The easiest way to configure your printer driver consists of the following steps :
It is adviseable that the configuration is tested a few times to make sure that possible differences when feeding the paper can be resolved.
A window is displayed which displays all the printer drivers which are available in PROforma. You can indicate the printer drivers you want to use as your default driver.
It is also possible to configure how PROforma should allocate memory and how much memory should be used for caching. This item will display a menu with the following items.
This allows you to set the maximum amount of memory which PROforma is allowed to use as buffer to render a page. You can also specify a negative amount, in which case at least that amount of memory has to remain free when allocating the buffer.
This item can also be indicated by pressing <m>. The amount are given in bytes.
To allow PROforma to display characters as fast as possible, PROforma uses a fontcache. This is a place where characters which have been rendered once are stored to make sure that the image doesn't have to be recalculated each time.
You can set the size of the fontcache. The default is 64kB (65536 bytes), which should be good for most applications. When you haven't got much memory in your system, you could reduce this number (even to zero).
This item can also be indicated by pressing <s>. The amount are given in bytes.
No matter how big the fontcache is, only a limited number of font/size combinations can be stored in the cache. You can determine what the minimum number of these pairs is. For each Gstate which is open, one extra font/size combination is possible in the fontcache.
Each font/size combination takes about 1.5kB, so you should not make this number too big. On the other hand, when a large fontcache is used, it is adviseable to increase this number as well.
This item can also be indicated by pressing <n>.
To make switching between colours as fast as possible, PROforma also uses a colour cache. Each Gstate which is opened will allocate some memory in which several colour patterns can be stored. The size of the colour cache is specified as the number of colours which are cached.
This item can also be indicated by pressing <c>.
The colour cache can cause a very large speed increase for some operations. The most important example being the drawing of pictures. The value is restricted to be between one and 256. The default value is 8. If you often use pictures which contain more colours, than it is a good idea to set the colour cache to at least that number.
Note that the pure black and pure white are never stored in the colour cache.
This option allows you to add fonts to PROforma so that they can be used in your programs. When the item is indicated, a fileselect window is displayed. In this window you have to indicate the font files which you want to be able to access. These fonts will then be made available to PROforma when you indicate do.
When the fonts are added in PROforma, the directory where the fonts were found are automatically also added in the searchpath for fonts. The fonts themselves will only be added if no other font with the same name exists.
This menu opion allows you to add extra directories to the searchpath for fonts. All you have to do is type the name of each directory you want in the path, pressing <enter> after each directory. Tou leave the window, press <escape>.
PFConfig will automatically make sure that the searchpath does not contain any duplicates.
This option will overwrite the existing PROforma_cfg file. It will be replaced by a new file with the info from the previous file, and the changes which have been made.