Well, I'm trying to get my aunt able to get WordPerfect 5.1 to run and print correctly. The alternative methods ended up being way too complicated for her (actually they ended up being rather a bit too complicated for me and I never got things 100% working with the alternative methods.) What she needs isn't something that requires her to hit print, minimize WP, fire up an external program, browse to the WP folder, select the output file, and finally print from there. She needs something where she simply hits print in WP and it prints.
So I saw Ykhwong's lovely CVS build and it struck me that DOSBox is better for WP5.1 in Windows than VDMSound anyway, plus that sounds like a great idea. I setup a simple dosbox.conf file that disables all soundcards (I left the PC speaker emulation on so it could beep on errors or something, but, that's it, no disney, no sb, nothing to get in the way or waste resources.) I set it to print using the windows print system and then fired it up to give it a shot. Well, I ran into numerous problems, most of which I guess are basically the same as some that were mentioned earlier (I had tried using a postscript printer driver thinking it was doing more of a translation kind of thing than full emulation.) So, finally I give up and decide to try to ask here even though it's unsupported officially (I tried Ykhwong's page, but, apparently my gender isn't allowed to post, or so it tells me when I hit ok.) Lucky for me I find this thread. Anyway, I get on Corel's site and download a driver for old Epson printers for WP5.1 and install that driver. I select "Epson LQ-850" as was specifically mentioned at some point or other, and then I try printing. Well, first of all, I find that the font still is just as bad as it was even on the DOS text printer driver, and second I find is that even though it KIND of supports bolded text (you have to look twice to even tell it's darker than the normal text though,) it still won't underline (best I got was individual letter underlining -- not whole word -- using the "Standard Printer" driver,) and italics are pretty bad (though usable.) Worse yet though, the font is really bad with spacing (I guess the term I'm looking for here is kerning?) with some letters spaced way too far apart and others so close together it's hard to read for someone like her who has to wear glasses as it is.
As I understand it, you simply replace the truetype font files in the fonts folder, correct? Well, I'm guessing there must be more to it than that because, first, those fonts aren't being used as nearly as I can tell (none of them look like the printed output) and, what's more, I tried replacing all of them with some standard fonts I had and it still made no difference (it's as if it's using some crappy built-in font.)
First of all, is there any hope for things like underlining, bold, and italics? I think she needs those and they aren't optional. Also, if there's no way to fix whatever is going on with the font, then it still won't work. She really really needs this though since she just can't switch to a newer WordPerfect and those alternative methods are a pain in the rear at best (pointless waste of time at the worst.) And yes, I know she really needs to upgrade badly, but, I can't force her and she's just kind of set with a dependancy on this, so I'd like to at least do what I can to ensure that when those ancient (>10 years) Toshiba laptops or the probably equally old laserjet printer finally break, she won't be ruined.
BTW, on a somewhat unrelated matter, is there any way I can disable all those shortcut keys (such as CTRL+F8)? They interfere with WordPerfect shortcut keys. Also, she still has some ancient keyboards specifically for WP which have more function keys, I think all the way up to F20. Any idea what those should be mapped to/from? (Let's just assume for the moment that I did find a way to hook the thing up mind. I'm not even sure her new laptop has a PS/2 plug, and that keyboard predates the PS/2 keyboards even, so I have no idea if it would work at all. Besides, even if there is no way to hook up the old keyboard, the normal shortcuts still need to work without interferance.)
Any ideas on possible solutions are welcome, but bear in mind that she's a lot less computer savvy than I am, so if it involves a ton of steps to do what should be a simple process (such as all the alternative methods I found for printing from WP5.1,) then it's a problem.
(BTW, for anyone who's interested, I found most of my information on drivers/etc at http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/51printers.html)
EDIT: I just realized that with the image output options I could easily attach an image that shows what I'm talking about. Attached is a cutout of the top of the sheet that I printed out in dosbox on the top section (shrunk down to fit on a 1024 display,) and in the bottom section is the font file it is supposed to be using (the others look similar, so I didn't bother to throw in a copy of every font since none look at all like the font on the top.) Note that it's kind of "fuzzier" since it has been shrunk down, but, the original resolution of 3000 something didn't seem very suitable for demonstration. Anyway, as you can see in there, it has letter spacing issues and the underlining is completely nonexistant. I might add that in the original image before I resized down I noticed that the font is pretty grainy with holes and little bits sticking out that shouldn't be (hard to see on paper since it's so small, but, once I looked closely I could see it was there.) That's almost impossible with a truetype font in fact, so it makes me wonder if it's a bitmap font or something.
EDIT2: Second attachment shows an example where bold is all but invisible. I didn't even resize this one down just to leave it as clear as possible. A grand prize goes out to the first person who can correctly guess which word in that sentence I actually bolded. d-: