final writer 97 in winUAE to... jpg? pdf? anything???

[idiot]

I finally got my old hard drive ripped and am going through my old Final Writer 97 docs.  I had a number of newsletters for my band (lots of graphics and font usage) which I'd like to recover.

Unfortunately I can't find a suitable solution to get them off the amiga, short of zooming in and taking 50 million screen shots and piecing them all together.

I can't even get winUAE to print to my printer.  My guess would be there's some way to trick the emulator into printing to a pdf or something, but even capturing the printer output to a bitmap would be good.  I'm actually surprised there isn't a way to set this up in the winUAE settings.  

I've read something about setting up a "postscript printer" whatever that is, but there is no such printer in my Amiga printer control panel. There's a seperate postscript control panel, but I don't know how to tell the emulator to use it.

It's just set up to print to the old HP Laserjet on the parallel port.  WinUAE doesn't pick this up though when I tell it to point that to my printer.  I'd rather it point to a file though, as I'd just have to rescan the printout and lose quality.

[idiot]

Again, this is on an emulator.  I don't know what a post script printer is or how to configure it on winUAE.

I was hoping there was a way to point the emulator to a file, so I could print on the emulated amiga environment and winUAE would save it as a file.

I keep hearing about "ghostscript" which talks about a post script printer, which as I said I don't know what is.  The final writer to PDF thing requires it also, and some other things (the instructions are not english so there's no help there).  My amiga's printer prefs are something like "hp laser jet, generic, etc" nothing about a postscript printer.  

Regardless, when I set it up to print the parallel port of the emulated amiga to my actual printer it doesn't work.  

Could this be my install of the workbench?  Would I be better off trying to get the required files for Final Writer 97 to work on the default AIAB setup?  That runs in a high resolution (mine doesn't -- not sure how to get that to work), so if nothing else screen shots would be easier to do.

RW222 wrote:
Think I managed to get a postscript file one time by pipeing PAR: to a file with a postscript printer slected.

Can you explain more step by step what this means?  Does it work with graphics and fonts?

[idiot]

motorollin wrote:
I'm guessing this won't be an issue with the PDF Creator I posted above, since it doesn't print, it exports to PDF (I assume).

As I said, it requires Ghostscript and the instructions aren't in English.  I can mess around with it but I was hoping for an easier (or more spelled out) solution.

[idiot]

cgutjahr wrote:
@idiot
Finalwriter can export files in the Postscript ("PS") format. If you don't know what PS is, just think of it as a rather old and extremely well documented format that's very similar to PDF.

I never used FW, so I don't know how good Finalwriter's PS export is (i.e. how much of your gfx, fonts, formatting etc. ends up in the PS document), but it is said to be rather good.

Load your document into FW, then change the printer settings to "Postscript" and "Print to file", select a filename for the destination file and print your document (this is more or less how it should work - as I said I don't know FW). You should now have a postscript file that you can easily convert to PDF.

Holy cow this is awesome!  Thank you!  Exactly what I wanted.  I found this site online that converts post script to pdf and it looks perfect.  

[idiot]

Strangely though the random Final Writer 97 fancy pants fonts all work perfect, but one (or more?) of the postscript fonts (from final copy 2) don't work at all.  In particular something called SoftOldE.  

I can live with it, but it's odd the "post script" font won't export to post script :S