[fptex] Windvi prints upside down

[Philip Hirschhorn]

My colleague has a windows machine on which I've installed fpTeX from
the TeX LIve cdrom.  All was well for a long time, but around a month
ago it started printing each character upside down (i.e., as if
reflected through a horizontal line through the middle of the
character), but only when printing to a non-postscript laser printer
directly attached to his machine (a NEC SuperScript 870); when he
prints over the network (using niprint) to a postscript printer, all
is well.

I tried uninstalling all TeX-related things and doing a fresh install
from the latest TeX Live cdrom (TeX Live 6), but the problem persists.
Each character is exactly where it's supposed to be, except upside
down.  (e.g., the letter "q" extends below the baseline as it should,
but it's the rounded part of the "q" that's below the baseline.)  My
colleague then tried deleting and reinstalling the windows printer
driver for his printer, but that didn't help either.

I tried printing from MS Word, and the printing is correct to both
this directly connected non-postscript printer and to the networked
postscript printer.  The only problem is printing from windvi to the
directly connected non-postscript printer.



I've searched through google's usenet archive and found a couple of
people with this problem.  Alas, the explanation (on the windows
programming groups) seems to be that windows expects bitmaps to be
stored bottom row first, rather than top row first, and if you have a
bitmap stored top row first it gets printed as I'm seeing it printed.

There are also some references to something called the "mapmode".
Apparently, the mapmode can be "text" or other things, which leads me
to think that somehow windows has changed so that it thinks the
characters from windvi are not graphics, whereas it previously may
have processed them as text, which it expected to be stored top row
first.  (I'm obviously just making wild guesses here.)



Thanks much for any help you can offer,
Phil Hirschhorn

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Philip Hirschhorn          psh@math.mit.edu
                           psh@poincare.wellesley.edu
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