In 10 years, on serveral networks and with a variety of printers, I had never seen pmail have the problems you describe.

And then I realized that the reason I evidently never saw the problem was because I always use stock printer drivers, i.e. ones that come with the system.

It is nonetheless strange that pmail would have a display dependency on a printer. For pre-print rendering, ok, but for display? Different resolution, size, and no margin or page length restrictions. And pmail still works fine even if there is no printer installed at all. Further, whatever the dependency is, it can't possibly be comparable to office/pdf where footnotes and headers/footers/margins/line lengths have to display as printed. Pmail, like any web browser also, is neither strictly wysiwyg, nor does it aspire to become that. Mail - like the web and in contrast to office/pdf - is a screen-targeted medium.

Dear Developers

Here's another suggestions/question.

Is it possible at all to untie the message reader dialog from the printer driver?

I use a network printer at work, and when I come home, sometimes I open messages in Pegasus Mail before my system has switched the default printers (which it does automatically), and then, because of the absent network printer, Pegasus Mail conveys its greetings in the form of "millions" of error message dialogs and eventually will not print the message.

PMail is the only program I have that seems to rely on the printer driver to display text on screen. It is certainly the only one for which the choice of default printer driver can have a huge impact.

Thank you very much!

lazy

[quote user="lazy_leukocyte"]Dear Developers

Here's another suggestions/question.

Is it possible at all to untie the message reader dialog from the printer driver?

I use a network printer at work, and when I come home, sometimes I open messages in Pegasus Mail before my system has switched the default printers (which it does automatically), and then, because of the absent network printer, Pegasus Mail conveys its greetings in the form of "millions" of error message dialogs and eventually will not print the message.

PMail is the only program I have that seems to rely on the printer driver to display text on screen. It is certainly the only one for which the choice of default printer driver can have a huge impact.

Thank you very much!

lazy
[/quote]

As a WYSIWYG application Pegasus Mail must ask the printer driver how to display the font.  The problem is that some printer drivers (HP especially), for some strange reason, also query to see if the printer is on line before answering.   This problem has been fixed for most of the printers by upgrading the printer driver and the drivers I'm using do not care if the printer is available or not.  FWIW, this delay problem was first uncovered when using the MS Office programs with multiple fonts. 

To help get around this issue I have deployed PDFCreator as my local 'default' printer on my laptop. This way there is always a 'printer ready to go, and has the added benefit of producing a PDF file if required.

Did I mention it is freeware?

 http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

Thank you for the feedback!

[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]

As a WYSIWYG application Pegasus Mail must ask the printer driver how to display the font.  The problem is that some printer drivers (HP especially), for some strange reason, also query to see if the printer is on line before answering.   This problem has been fixed for most of the printers by upgrading the printer driver and the drivers I'm using do not care if the printer is available or not.  FWIW, this delay problem was first uncovered when using the MS Office programs with multiple fonts.

[quote user="lazy_leukocyte"]Thank you for the feedback!

[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]

As a WYSIWYG application Pegasus Mail must ask the printer driver how to display the font. The problem is that some printer drivers (HP especially), for some strange reason, also query to see if the printer is on line before answering. This problem has been fixed for most of the printers by upgrading the printer driver and the drivers I'm using do not care if the printer is available or not. FWIW, this delay problem was first uncovered when using the MS Office programs with multiple fonts.

[/quote]

I have the problem with both HP (work) and Brother (home) printers. And really, Pegasus Mail is the only WYSIWYG application that behaves like this (I have e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice installed).

Setting the default printer driver to the PDF driver is not a solution; my laptop switches printer drivers automatically depending on what network I am in (work/home), and this does make working a lot faster.

Thanks anyways.

lazy
[/quote]

You have not really run into this with MS Office then you've not been doing a whole lot of formatting.  Like I said, this was originally discovered by people using MS Office;m you see it more often in Pegasus mail because you are opening messages a lot more than you are opening new pages with different fonts in Word.  Have you upgraded the printer drivers?  Most of the new one do not have this problem of checking the status of the printer when asked how to display the font..

Thanks, your comments are appreciated.

Even though I had only downloaded and installed the specific printer driver for the LaserJet 4200 at work a few months ago, I downloaded and installed HP's current Universal Print Driver today, and the problem is solved. Interesting.

lazy