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Tasks July 2001 • Vol.7 Issue 7 |
 From Palm To Page PDAs, With A Little Help, Print Much Like PCs | ||
 As much as we like to think that a paperless office is just around the corner, most computers are still used to generate paper documents. Printing from any computer requires a way to get the information from the computer to the printer and the computer knowing how to communicate with the printer. When you click Print from the File menu in Microsoft Word, for example, Windows first uses its printer driver to figure out what it needs to send to the printer to make your document look the way you formatted it. When printing from a desktop or notebook computer, we tend to take the ease of this for granted. PDAs don't come with a printer driver installed, which makes printing a bit more complicated. And printing may not be an issue for most handheld users. After all, you generally synchronize your handheld computer with a desktop or notebook PC and print your files from there. Handheld printing may become an issue if the user cannot wait to get back to an office and synchronize before printing. For example, a doctor entering medical orders into a handheld could print off a copy for the nurse before leaving. Maybe someone who is traveling for a long period of time and can't get back to sync to a PC will want to print. For example, a businesswoman who will be on the road for three weeks before returning to the office would not want to wait until then to do her printing, especially if she needed to give something to a client. This article covers printing with both Pocket PCs and Palm PDAs. Both lack a parallel printer port and need an alternative way to get the signal to a printer. Both need special software to print since neither comes from the factory knowing how to print. In short, both are paperless computers that need aftermarket help to make it in a paper-based world.
 Connecting Your Handheld To A Printer. Finding a printer may be the biggest printing obstacle when you're on the road. First, you have to find someone willing to let you borrow a printer. Unless you are very lucky and find a printer with an IR (infrared) port, you are also going to need permission to unhook the original printer cable and connect your own. Some users get around this by carrying a small, battery-powered printer with them so they always have a printer handy. A portable printer simplifies setting up your PDA since you only have to worry about configuring your handheld to work with a single model of printer. You have to change the settings every time you output to a different printer. Since PDAs lack a parallel port, your next problem is getting the information from the PDA to a printer. Handheld computers have an IR port, so if you have access to an IR printer, which usually costs $300 or more for a simple inkjet version, you're set. All you do is line up the PDA's and printer's IR ports. To add infrared capabilities to an existing printer, you can use an infrared-to-parallel adapter. There are many available. A good one is the ACTiSYS IR100M (http://www.actisys.com/actir100.html). There are no switches to set; you just plug it in and go. Once plugged in, you print by lining up the PDA's IR port with the IR port on the cable. It has a pass-through connector so you can print from your desktop PC normally and then print from your handheld by aligning the handheld IR port with the IR adapter. Since you are most likely to connect the adapter, print, and then remove it so you can take it with you, having pass-through abilities may not be a significant concern. The light, small ACTiSYS IR100M adapter works in both Pocket PC and Palm devices and costs $99. A second option for Pocket PC users is to use an adapter to convert the USB (Universal Serial Bus) port to a parallel printer port. One such adapter is the Aegis Parallel Print adapter ($40; http://www.primenet.com/~aegistec). Using this type of adapter requires that you completely disconnect the regular printer cable while printing since there is no pass-through ability. However, as discussed above, this is not normally a major concern. The Palm does not have a USB port so this second option will not work on Palms. Regardless if you make your connection using an IR adapter or a USB or parallel cable, the connection is going to be much slower than a desktop connection to a printer using a standard parallel cable. As a result, both PDAs will print much slower than their desktop counterparts. Since PDA documents tend to be short, this should not be much of a problem.
Printing With A Pocket PC. Windows CE has no built-in printing support. And, not only does Windows CE not know how to print, none of the applications that come with your Pocket PC know how to print. But the major applications for the Pocket PC all have Microsoft Office counterparts, so the easiest way to print is to use ActiveSync to load your documents onto your desktop PC and print from there. Since Windows CE does not support printing, you will need software to manage the process. PrintPocketCE from Field Software ($39.95; http://www.fieldsoftware.com) is an excellent choice. Microsoft does not allow the use of ActiveX controls (a software module based on Microsoft's COM [Component Object Model] architecture that enables a program to add functionality that blends in and appears as normal parts of the program) to alter its Pocket programs, so PrintPocketCE does not add a print option to the individual programs. Rather, it is a standalone program. PrintPocketCE presents you with a list of documents stored on your Pocket PC. Documents it can print include Word, plain text, and .RTF (rich-text format) files, along with e-mail messages. Using the icons at the bottom, you can toggle between displaying documents and displaying e-mail. To print a document, you simply tap it. PrintPocketCE asks you to select the printer to use and to set any special options you want. PrintPocketCE supports a wide variety of laser, inkjet, and portable printers, so it will likely support most of the printers you will encounter. Once you are satisfied with the settings, tap Start Printing and PrintPocketCE prints the selected file. While the Pocket PC has Office applications, its formats differ from those of its desktop counterparts. Microsoft has not released the file format for Pocket Excel, so PrintPocketCE cannot print Excel files directly. You can copy the information to the Clipboard and paste it into Word for printing. Of course, this approach is less than perfect since the worksheet does not look the same in Word as it does in Excel. Field Software offers a second printing program, PocketShot ($15), to print the contents of the current screen. This works well for small spreadsheets but is unmanageable for worksheets of a larger size. The Windows CE inking format (handwriting and drawings) is also being kept proprietary by Microsoft and files must be printed using PocketShot. Printing With A Palm. Like the Pocket PC, the Palm operating system and software lack native support for printing. The situation for the Palm is slightly more complex than the Pocket PC, since some Palm programs have no Windows counterpart, making synchronizing and then printing using Palm Desktop problematic. Luckily, several programs give your Palm the ability to print. One such program is PrintBoy ($14.99; http://www.bachmannsoftware.com/printboy.htm). PrintBoy supports a wide variety of laser, inkjet, and portable printers. Rather than having one program to load data files and do all the printing, as PrintPocketCE does, PrintBoy comes complete with a suite of plug-in applets. Applets are small program modules. These applets support printing of addresses, appointments, to-do lists, memos, e-mail, and other information stored on your Palm. The PrintBoy Shell application is a launch program for the various PrintBoy applets, as well as for the configuration program. When started, the PrintBoy Shell describes each type of data, such as your calendar or to-do list, that it can print. Tapping on the description will launch the applet needed to print that data. PrintBoy does a good job of printing. For example, when printing your to-do list, it automatically sorts your to-do's by priority and due date and even includes a handy checkbox on the left so you can check off completed tasks as you work. PrintBoy Shell also prints other types of data well. PrintBoy also includes an applet for printing from the Clipboard. This allows any Palm application that supports copying data to the Clipboard to print, even if PrintBoy does not directly support the application itself. This includes Web browsers, e-mail software, document readers, databases, and more. For example, on the Palm VII Organizer, you can copy wireless Web clippings from the Internet to the clipboard, switch to PrintBoy Clipboard, and print out your Web page in a matter of seconds. PrintBoy is not the only printing program available for the Palm. Others include PalmPrint ($39.95; http://www.stevenscreek.com/pilot/palmprint.shtml) and TealPrint ($19.95; http://www.tealpoint.com). All three programs mentioned here provide a free demo program so you can try them before you buy them. In the end, printing from your PDA is a trade-off. To print, you must buy special software and most likely carry additional hardware with you, but you gain added flexibility. And with the right combination of hardware and software, you can get good quality printouts from your handheld computer no matter where you are.  by Ronny Richardson |
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