PSION XChange

While the sources for the PSION XChange business suite are probably lost forever, Erling Jacobsen has done a great deal of work to improve the suite in the past. Unfortunately he stopped after releasing version 3.90L.

Just for fun and my personal enjoyment I picked it up where Erling left and made a few more changes to the executable. I have continued his versioning scheme and the latest version is now called 3.90N.

The download here is only the pure executable. For a complete XChange distribution with all its files visit Erling Jacobsen's page. This being said, you can get version 3.90N here:

xchange390n.zip (minimum display resolution for use is 512x512!)

Please note that I take no responsibility nor obligations in doing this release. Also, please do NOT ask me any generic XChange support questions, I do not even use XChange myself, other than for viewing the odd Quill document now and then.

Changes since 3.90L

1. Colour mode changes

The line drawing routines are replaced with code that is colour-mode agnostic. This includes the code that draws the white menu borders. This has, to a large degree, already worked in 3.90M, but is now extended to work in all situations, including Easel graphics.

Quill's status area now uses a slightly different font colour in high colour mode to better differentiate itself from the edited text.

Known problem: the pie drawing routines in Easel have not been updated and I also don't intend to change this fact.

2. Extended workspace

The main window is now twice as high as the original XChange, therefore minimum Y resolution to run this new XChange is 512 pixels. Especially Quill didn't cope too well with the extended workspace, but hopefully all problems have been identified and fixed. Still, there may be more lurking, you've been warned.

3. File name acceptance

All modules now also accept file names that use the DOS extension separator ".", i.e. "readme.doc" now also can be read.

4. Archive formfeed bug

XChange's Archive shares the printing code with the other modules like Quill. The problem for many people now was that while the stand-alone Archive ignores the lines per page setting in the printer driver, XChange's archive does not. This leads to additional form feeds in the printer output.

To deal with the situation the user can now set "lines per page" to 0, which will disable the automatic generation of form feeds. If done in the xchange_dat driver, this will affect all modules, again including Quill.

Fortunately enough Erling's patched XChange allows different drivers for different modules. If you have a printer driver called "archv_dat" in the XChange directory, Archive will use that instead of the generic xchange_dat file. This way you can have two separate printer settings, one for Archive and one for the rest. Just set Archive's "lines per page" setting to 0 and you're done.