Lose Your Mind Development

I recently received an email about running Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 from a portable drive. I had not considered this during development. But there is nothing in the code that prevents Printer’s Apprentice from running this way.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 is based on the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework. So this needs to be installed on any computer that you want to run the application on. This is covered below.

Here are some steps for setting up Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 from a portable drive. I store applications in an “apps” folder on my drive and use this in the examples. But you can place Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 in any folder on your drive.

So lets get started.

1. If you don’t already have Printer’s Apprentice 8.0, download it from the following URL and install it on your PC.

http://www.loseyourmind.com/zipfiles/prnapp80.zip

2. Download a copy of the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Redistributable Package and save it on your portable drive. This is a single 22 MB download name dotnetfx.exe. If you need to run Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 on a machine that does not have .NET 2.0 installed, you will need to run this first. (Note that Vista already has .NET 2.0 installed on it.)

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Redistributable Package

On my portable drive, I store this in an apps\NET Runtime 2.0 folder. (Click to enlarge.)

3. Then copy the contents of the Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 folder on your PC to your portable drive. Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 is typically found in the following folder.

c:\program files\lose your mind development\printer’s apprentice 8.0

After I have copied PA from my local drive, the portable drive now looks like the screenshot below. (Click to enlarge.) Make sure you copy all the files and folders in the screenshot.

4. You can now run Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 from the portable drive by double clicking the prnapp.exe file.

The only thing that could cause confusion is the configuration file. It is stored on the local hard drive rather than the portable drive. It is usually in the following file.

\documents and settings\{account}\application data\printer’s apprentice\prnapp.exe.config

This is actually not a bad thing. The main thing that the configuration files stores is the location of the font groups folder. And I’m sure that as you move from PC to PC with your drive, the font groups will likely reside on the local drive instead of your portable drive.

If you have any questions, shoot an email to me at helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

we are moving forward with final testing on the latest round of updates for Printer’s Apprentice 8.0. Here are some notes and screenshots from the upcoming version.

A user from the Czech Republic noted that the Sample Text and Compare Fonts tab were showing non-ANSI characters incorrectly. Those tabs use the Win32 TextOut function. As it turns out, I had a typo in the function declaration.

Many older Win32 calls include both ANSI and Unicode implementations. If you don’t include “Unicode” in the declaration, .NET assumes you want to use the ANSI version. So this was an easy, quick fix. The screenshot below shows the Compare Fonts tab with non-ANSI characters working correctly.

Since I use a US keyboard layout, I kept using the Character Set tab to copy non-ANSI characters and paste them into the Compare Fonts tab for testing. And for some reason, I kept right-clicking cells on the grid thinking that a context menu would popup with the Copy command. I suppose it is just a habit as just about any application now has context menus everywhere.

Well there was no context menu on this tab. So I added it. The Zoom command will open the character in the Single Character tab. And the Copy menu puts the formatted character in the clipboard.

For consistency also added a context menu to the Single Character tab. But it only has the Copy command.

If there are any other context menus you would like to see added or expanded, please let me know. One user mentioned adding Install, Uninstall, etc to a context menu on the Compare Fonts tab. This is a great idea and something I’m looking into.

Got comments, feature requests, etc? Shoot me an email at helpdesk at loseyourmind dot com. — Bryan

Things have been quiet on the blog for a while. But that does not mean we are not working on Printer’s Apprentice!

Behind the scenes, I’ve been continuing work on Printer’s Apprentice. Most of the work is on stability improvements for the software. A few users have come up with scenarios that crash the software. So I’m working on those issues.

I hope to have a new release out before the end of December. If you have encountered any crashes or you have suggestions for improvement, please shoot me an email at helpdesk at lose your mind dot com. — Bryan