DMBANNER
Version 3.0

by
M S I
1506 East Market Street
Wilmington, De 19804

This program is NOT freeware. You are encouraged to use this program for
a period of two weeks, at which time you should send in your $10 REGISTRATION
fee. Registration entitles you to upgrades and notices of new products.
You may distribute this program to whomever you wish, so long as the original
files DMBANNER.EXE and DMBANNER.DOC are always included together. You may
NOT in any way make changes OR additions to either file. As for all you
Public Domain distribution houses and users groups, you have permission to
distribute DMBANNER as long as no more than $5 is charged for the diskette it
is on.However, we will NOT support ANY calls/letters from unregistered
users.Also, please note that the file DMBANNER.DOC may NOT be modified in
any way... the program checks for tampering, and can get nasty...
WE GOT TIRED OF P/D WAREHOUSES ADDING THEIR OWN LOGOS / SEND-FOR-HELP FORMS!

A note from the Author:

DMBANNER is the BEST banner program I've ever seen. It is the result of
a lot of frustration with other banner programs, which produced block
characters or characters with ragged edges. I believe it will be the ONLY
banner program you need to keep in your library - it's banners are far
superior to any other's. Try it yourself, and see how it works. I am
distributing this through MSI because of my belief that NO ONE should EVER
have to buy a program without trying it first - How many times have YOU
been dissapointed by products that didn't do what you wanted them to? How
many times have you decided NOT to purchase a product because you weren't
sure it would do what you wanted? Fortunately we now have an alternative -
SHAREWARE. Through this policy we can try programs completely in real life
situations, and make our own decisions as to whether it's worth it or not.
I urge to to put this program to the test - print out a banner and post it
in your office / home / school. See how many people ask you what you used
to print it - and how many people want copies of the program, or banners
printed. Then, if you're satisfied, send in your $10 registration. It's
worth it.
Dwight Morgan


INSTRUCTIONS:

When you first run the program, it will show you a SHAREWARE notice and
make you wait ten seconds before you can hit a key to go on to the main menu.
We know that this title screen is going to bother some - however, it is a
small price to pay for having a shareware product. We are, incidentally,
looking into providing registered users a copy with NO notices at all...
However, after hitting any key you are transported to the main menu.
On the Main Menu you have four options. If you are using a standard
Epson Compatible printer you may immediately start at option 1, and work
your way to option 3 (Printing the Banner). However, if you do NOT have
an Epson compatible printer, OR the Banner does NOT print correctly after
running through options 1-3 (which signifies that you do NOT have a completely
Epson compatible printer), you will have to do option 4. Let's look at the
options in order now:


1) INPUT MESSAGE TO BE PRINTED AS A BANNER.

After selecting this option, the cursur will jump down to the line:
'MESSAGE TO PRINT:'. In the bottom box on the screen you will see a list
of characters that the banner can print. You may use any of those characters
in your banner. You may also use the backspace (<-) to eliminate an incorrect
entry.You also have the option of using the Escape (Esc) key to eliminate
ALL entries on the line, and start over. Your message is limited to 40
characters; however, if you need a longer Banner, you may print the Banner in
consecutive parts, thus eliminating ANY limit to banner length. When done
entering the characters to print, hit the (Enter) key.


2) INPUT STRING THAT WILL COMPOSE LETTERS IN BANNER.

Now the fun starts. With this option, you can specify what character(s)
the letters of your banner will be composed of. Most other banner programs
use the character '#' to compose the letters; you can use ANY with this
program! And you're NOT LIMITED to one character - you can use a whole
sentence if you like! For example, you can print a banner that reads
'Happy 16th Birthday', and have each character of the banner composed of
the characters 'Sweet Sixteen'. And DMBANNER offsets the sentence by one
character for each line, so that the message may be read across OR downwards.
The Default for this option, (or when no characters are selected) is to
print every character made up of the same character - An 'A' made of 'A's, etc.
Another exciting use of this feature is to give your characters a 'sculptured'
look by using special combinations of characters. For example, use the
characters '-<[]>-', or '/ '. Note that in many cases you'll want to leave
spaces at the end of your characters, for added attractiveness and/or
readability. Finally, you can use any special characters your printer might
accept by holding down the Alternate (Alt) key and typing in the DECIMAL
Ascii value of the character on the KEYPAD (NOT the numbers at the top of
the keyboard!!). For example, if your printer accepts character 252 as a
completely filled square, you could HOLD DOWN the (ALT) while you type in
'252' on the KEYPAD. Please note that the character that appears on your
screen may have NO relation to the character printed. (In the above example,
character 252 shows as a blank).


3) PRINT THE BANNER.

This option does just that - it prints the Banner using the options you've
set. Your only option at this time is to hit the (Esc) key to abort your
Banner. Please note that the printer will NOT stop immediately - have
patience and wait. If your Banner is NOT printing correctly, see option 4.
When the Banner is printed the program will NOT advance to the next page!!
Due to differences in printers, and the possibility of the user wanting to
print enlarged Banners, we felt it was best to leave the printer where it
is. On some printers the FormFeed will be off at this time!! Please adjust
your printer manually, if this is so.


4) CHANGE THE PRINTER CONTROL CODES USED.

This option allows you to customize the program to your printer. The
program defaults to Epson compatibility. However, if you need to change
the Initialization codes you may do so at this option.Once this option
is chosen, a file named 'DMBANNER.PRT' is created on the disk. This file
will now be loaded each time you run DMBANNER, and your selected printer
codes will be used. Now that we've explained HOW it works, lets see the
options available.
Initializing Codes: 27/79/15/27/65/8/27/85
This line shows the character codes that will be sent to the printer
BEFORE the Banner is started to set it up. These are the default codes
that set the program up to work with an EPSON compatible printer.
The numbers are the DECIMAL representations of the characters to be sent,
separated by a slash. In this example:
27/79/ sets the paper perforation skip off
15/ sets compressed print on
27/65/8/ sets it to 8 dot row spacing
27/85 sets unidirectional printing
Finishing Codes: 27/64
This line shows the characters sent AFTER finishing with the Banner.
In this case (the default for Epsons) the printer will do a RESET.
Some people may prefer to have a /12/27/85 here, which will cause a
form feed BEFORE the reset.