Maul Publisher FAQ and Support

This page provides technical support and other information by listing those problems found by users. This mostly consists of information not found in the main manual, which also has a section on problems and how to resolve them.

Asking for help

Before reporting installer bugs, please read the manual page that opens when you start the installer.

For program related bugs, please read the problem page in the main manual, which lists a number of problems and how to resolve them. You will also find bug reporting procedures in this section.

Please send any messages requesting support or further information to

Maul Support<maulDESPAM@DESPAMmanglais.com> (please remove DESPAM from email addresses). Be prepared to wait at least 48 hours for a response.

Frequently asked questions

Installation questions

The following items can cause the installer to fail.

• (OS/2)Unexpected whitespace in the path or libpath statements of your config.sys file. Make sure that paths are separated by a semicolon (;) only, and have no spaces between them.
• The installer cannot create more than one level of paths. If you are installing to 'c:\program\maul', for example, 'c:\program' must exist!
• The installer writes a log file called install.log to the installation destination. If the install fails, make sure that both the install from, and install to, paths are correct. If necessary, check that install.exe does not have a strange working path set in it's properties page.
• (OS/2)Some systems may have an odd version of unpack.exe installed. There should only be one unpack.exe program on your system. You should find it in the os2 directory, and nowhere else. See the installer online help for further information on this subject.
• You should use the installer to uninstall maul. Only in this way can you be sure that the .ini files or registry are cleaned up as required.
• (OS/2 Aurora convenience pack 2)Obviously, some recent graphics driver have not been tested with Maul. Hence I must unfortunately report that some display drivers do not produce dashed lines correctly, and that on some systems the default display driver crashes with Maul when the WINOS2 drivers VWIN.SYS, and possibly VW32S.sys, are installed. Symptoms are a crashed screen, keyboard, and mouse. Hard reset to exit!

The following items are required for the application to work.

• Quite simply, you must have a printer driver installed, or the application will fail.
• (Windows)You must run maul with at least 16bit colours. Ideally, you should run maul on NT based Windows 2000 or XP, as this is the closest to OS/2 in 2d graphics performance.
• (OS/2)On OS/2 you may possibly have a corrupted printer list. You can try running maul from the command line with the /nopdc command. If it starts up with this parameter, but not without, then you will have to uninstall all your printer drivers, and then re-install them. Some of your other applications will suddenly behave a little better too! See the installer online help for further information on this subject.

General questions

Q:What's it do?

A:It creates beautiful printed documents. i.e. its a desktop publisher. You need a real desktop publisher if you are going to print clear publications, as you require precise scaling in order to get the right results out of a printer or image setter, particularly when printing bitmaps containing line art, for example.

Q:Why "Maul Publisher"?

A:"Maul" can mean just about anything you like. It originally meant "Maison Anglais Ultimate Layout" - as a working title that seemed a bit long. Since then it has been suggested that I should call it something like "EasyDesign"(already used), or "Easy Publisher" (also used), but hey! We drive around in "Fords", "Hoover" the house, shoot each with "Colt's", and drink "Coke"(sic). Get the picture?

Q:Can I use Maul to create web pages?

A:No. Maul was designed to create printed publications. When you can produce web pages with the degree of complexity that Maul manages, that situation will change. In the meantime, there are some very decent products out there for creating web pages.

Q:What is a handler?

A:A handler is a pluggable component for Maul Publisher. These components are kept in dll files. A dll file may consist of a number of related handlers. The dll files are managed by a simple text list. This list is read whenever the publisher is started. Dll files are usually kept in the \bin path where the program was installed.

Q:Can I create my own handler?

A:Of course you can. If you can program in C or C++, you can download the API and create your own handler, either using the examples provided, or your own way. See the Developer Information page for further details.

Q:How do I create curved text?

A:To draw curved text, you first need to create a curved line using the frame handler. Once you have drawn a satisfactory curved line frame, attach the border text handler 'Wingstamp express' to it. This handler will draw text along a curve.

Q:How do I create an index?

A:First, you must create an index control file. This file is a plain text file containing the keywords that you want to index. Read the index creation manual to find out what the file should contain. You use the File->import menu item to import an index control file into a text frame. The result will be an index of the whole publication.

Q:How do I create a colour separation?

A:First, enable CMYK colour separation in the Options menu. Then print the file. If you print to a postscript printer (on Windows, try the 'MS Publisher Imagesetter' printer driver), set to print to a file, you will get a usable postscript output file. Each time you print, you will be asked which separation to print. Once you have your four postscript separations, you can take them to a print shop.

Q:Why are there bold and italic buttons in the font dialog, but not on the toolbar?

A:The bold and italic buttons in the dialog allow you to use synthesised bold and italic fonts. This is not a good idea for desktop publishing purposes. However, both OS/2 and Windows have a somewhat convoluted font selection mechanism, so to allow you to fix strange problems with OS/2 publications imported into windows, these legacy buttons have remained. Generally, you should avoid using the buttons, and use one of the available font styles.

Q:How do I import information?

A:Although few text file formats are available at present, you can usually find a way to import everything you need. Importing or exporting is performed by using the File->import or File->export menu items. What you can import or export is dependent upon where you are, and what you are doing. You can import frames when you are in frame editing mode. If you have a text frame selected, and you switch mode to the text handler, you can import text. Another way to import or export is to use cut and paste operations within the selected handler.
This leads to a particularly useful trick with the frame handler. Frames are also copied to the clipboard as metafiles, and most current word processors will allow you to paste metafiles into your page as an object. This allows you to use maul to create company logo's and the like.

Q:How do I import large text documents?

A:The easiest way is to create a linkable master page. Do this by creating a three page document containing the text frame layout that you require. Ensure that you link all the text frames together across all three pages, in order that the text will flow across all frames.
Now save the second page of your three page document as a master page. This creates a re-linkable master page, because the program will mark and identify those links that have crossed the page boundaries and have been broken.
Estimate the number of pages that you require and create a new ('File->New...' menu) document with the number of pages that you require, using the master page you saved earlier. Select the first text frame on the first page, switch to the text handler, and you will get a dialog asking you whether to make the frame editable. Click on 'Ok', and import your large text document.

Q:Can I read older OS/2 publications?

A:Yes you can, with some reservations. First, some of the very earliest publications did not have a very strict internal layout, and may not load properly. Secondly, unless you have the same fonts on both systems, you will be asked to substitute fonts. Also, early publications did not store the codepage, so codepage translations may not be correct. Later versions will have their codepage translated correcly for most european languages.

Q:What abount reading Windows publications on OS/2?

A:Yes, now you can do that too. The codepage will automatically be translated for you if the translation codepage exists. Currently, this includes 1252 to 850, 1250 to 852, and vice versa. You can create your own translation codepage by using the file '1252-850.cvt' found in maul's etc path as an example. Copy it to a new filename before editing!

Q:Which file formats can I import?

A:The number of bitmap formats that you can now import is as follows:-

.BMP .VGA .BGA .RLE .DIB .RL4 .RL8

OS/2 1.1, 1.2, 2.0 / Windows 3.0 bitmap

.ICO

OS/2 and Windows icon resources.

.GIF

CompuServe Graphics Interchange Format.

.PCX .PCC

ZSoft PC Paintbrush Image format.

.TIF .TIFF

Microsoft/Aldus Tagged Image File Format support.

.TGA .VST .AFI

Truevision Targa/Vista bitmap.

.IFF .LBM

Amiga IFF / ILBM Interleaved bitmap format

.VID

IBM M-Motion/M-Control YUV video still image files of type packed 12-bit YUV data.

.PGM

Portable Greyscale-map (binary P5 type)

.PPM

Portable Pixel-map (binary P6 type)

.KPS

IBM KIPS

.IAX

IBM Image Access eXecutive

.XBM

X Windows bitmap

.SPR .SPRITE

Archimedes Sprite format from RiscOS

.PSE .PSEG .PSEG38PP .PSEG3820

IBM Printer Page Segment

.IMG

GEM Raster

.CVP

Portrait

.JPG .JPEG .JPE

JPEG File Interchange Format

.PCD

(OS/2 only) Kodak Photo CD image files (with OS/2 multimedia installed).

.MBM

Maul's own bitmap+maskmap file format.

With the OS/2 version you can import OS/2 metafile data from a number of applications, especially those that produce vector graphics. This format will allow the import of bar graphs and other graphics from PM Draw (on bonus pack for OS/2 V2.1), for example.
With the Windows version you can import Windwos enhanced metafile data (*.emf). Again, most vector graphics applications write metafiles to the clipboard when copying or pasting.
Metafiles are operating system specific. You cannot see an OS/2 metafile after conversion to Windows, and the same is true in reverse.

You can also import the following text formats:-

.ftx

native Maul FFTXT format.

.*

Plain text format (ASCII/ANSI)

.RTF

Microsoft® Rich Text Format V1.5

You can also import and export frames and grouped frames into the frame handler. This is a quick means to create scaleable clipart for company logo's etc.

Q:Can I create Acrobat (pdf) documents

A:You can try one of the pdf printer drivers, such as pdfwriter for OS/2 (http://www.netlabs.org), or even the Adobe's own acrobat distiller. The results may well depend upon the complexity of the publication.

Windows version specific questions

Q:What is the 'MS Publisher Imagesetter'?

A:It's a printer driver that is supplied with Windows2000 (and maybe other versions). If installed and set to print to a file, this driver seems to create postscript format data. Hopefully, a print shop will be able to read these files for further processing. You may need to create a new file for every page though! If you are using normal bitmaps, use Maul's inbuilt colour separation mechanism to create your seps.

OS/2 version specific questions

Q:Why does Maul need multimedia support?

A:The bitmap handler uses multimedia support codecs to import the PhotoCd file format.

Q:What if I don't have a sound card?

A:The multimedia extensions can be installed even if you make no use of them for sound or video's. You have the added advantage that OS/2 will recognise and open a number of commonly used image types, using an inbuilt viewer. If you don't like to have multimedia installed, you can uninstall the PhotoCD handler. You need to find the '.bin' path where Maul is installed, and run 'rem_pcd.cmd'.