Contents of this Document:

What is TurboPrint ?

TurboPrint was designed to overcome the printing limitations dictated by the Amiga's operating system and to use the capabilities of your printer to their full extent. Although the Amiga as a graphics computer is capable of producing and displaying brilliant, colourful and attractive graphics, its printer interface often leaves much to be desired when it comes to graphics printing. With TurboPrint, the graphics output will match the quality of your screen display, as it features special graphics algorithms normally only used for high-end production in the professional printing industry.

TurboPrint is currently the only printer driver system for the Amiga which will allow you to print graphics in all 16 million colours available through the AGA graphics chip set via the normal Workbench printer interface. Only Turbo Print offers a complete replacement of the printer.device, removing the limitation of 4096 colours or 16 grey scales, respectively. With TurboPrint's Graphics Print Manager you don't need the AGA graphics chip set or a third party display board to print 24 bit-graphics in photographic quality. This TurboPrint add-on enables you to print pictures directly from floppy or hard disk in maximum resolution and with the lowest memory consumption possible. It even supports PC graphics standards like JPEG and PCX. Apart from the above, TurboPrint allows for numerous settings to manipulate the printout, like precise size control, perfect colour settings, powerful contrast and brightness correction, smoothing, different dithering patterns, and many, many more. When developing TurboPrint, we especially focused on the combination of high speed and low memory requirements. To achieve this, the main program was written entirely in 68k-Assembler, the fastest and most efficient programming language available for the Amiga. Because it replaces the original printer interface of the Amiga Workbench, all text and graphics output sent to the Workbench interface will be redirected through the TurboPrint system. This secures highest compatibility and flawless operation with almost every program available today. To help you control its powerful features, TurboPrint comes with a special preferences editor called TurboPrefs. TurboPrefs may also be installed as a resident program waiting in the background, so that it can be immediately activated at the click of a button. Great care has been taken to make TurboPrint as easy to use as possible. Although having all features you could possibly expect (and more), the program does not confuse the user with lots of settings not really required to produce a great printout.

Additional Features of Turboprint

One of the prime design goals, apart from delivering extraordinary printing quality and speed, was to make printing simpler. TurboPrint allows you e.g. to produce a hard copy of the current screen or to save screens as IFF pictures on disk, which can then be further manipulated with a paint program of your choice. Even third party graphics boards are supported. TurboPrint even offers a poster function to print oversized pictures on a predefined number of sheets, which can then be assembled to create large posters.

TurboPrint Professional

The successful TurboPrint is now available in a heavily improved version. It is not only easier to use: the new "intelligent" printer drivers deliver unmatched print quality, even without requiring individual user-defined settings. The "True-Match" colour correction system enables TurboPrint to correct each colour separately from the others, eliminating printing errors (like blue being printed as violet) before they happen. Thanks to newly developed algorithms and 100% optimised processor code, TurboPrint works out these complicated corrections at a speed never seen on the Amiga before. Although easy to use, the various configuration possibilities have not been sacrificed. In addition to the True-Match colour correction, the user still can individually configure factors like brightness, contrast, gamma value and various colour-related values. Beyond that, TurboPrint now also provides support for individual printer models. For most of the printers available, TurboPrefs contains a separate menu page with printer-specific preferences. The  Graphics Publisher features a special layout mode, which allows for easy selection of printout size and position with the mouse. In addition to that, a 256 colour dithering facility (previously: 16) produces a greatly improved screen display in combination with the AGA graphics chip set. With third party graphics boards and CyberGraphX, you can even get a 24 bit "TrueColour" preview! The graphics publisher gives you the possibility to preview several preference settings, e.g. different brightness gradients, directly on-screen. In addition, TurboPrint now supports more graphics formats than before, e.g. JPEG, BMP, PCX and PhotoCD.

Developer Information

Turboprint includes a 24bit printer.device and it has become the standard for 24bit printing. If you are a software developer and want to upgrade your application from 12 to 24bit, please download our developer information. You will see that it requires just a few lines of code to get real high-quality 24bit output. This 24 bit interface has been included in Turboprint Professional since version 3 which was released in 1995, so implementing 24bit printing using the Turboprint standard will benefit most Amiga users.

To download our developer info click here: tp_devel.lha (9k).