tsp@hadron.UUCP (T. Scott Pyne) (03/13/86)
[] Well, it has been a week since my posting asking for experiences with Adobe Systems' Transcript package to interface troff to the Apple Laserwriter. I've received 8 replies via mail, and several more have been posted as followup articles. Thanks to all of you who responded. The unanimous opinion of the mail replies has been: Transcript and the Laserwriter work extremely well. (Several respondents said "works perfectly/flawlessly".) The binary version from Adobe is said to work fine under 4.2 on a VAX. The LW fonts are said to be lovely, too. The only non-positive comments were (1) that you have to physically change cables to go from using the LW with (e.g.) a VAX to using it with a Macintosh; (2) that troff limits the number of typefaces which can be used in a single file, so you cannot easily mix, e.g., Times Roman and Helvetica in the same file; and (3) that everyone likes it so much that you spend lots of money on the expensive toner cartridges for the LW while people experiment. Problem (2) can be alleviated if you are willing to edit the Postscript intermediate file before it goes to the LW. Postscript is readable ASCII, so this task is not especially difficult. BTW, you can of course write your own Postscript and send it to the LW if you are so inclined. Neil Groundwater (seismo!hadron!sundc!harry!npg), an employee of Sun, mentioned that Sun resells the LW with Transcript and some extra tools such as LWGRIND (similar to vgrind), a previewer to show the output accurately on a Sun display, and a screen-dump utility for Suns. Chris Tweed (mcvax!edcaad.ed.ac.uk!chris) mentioned that Transcript comes with "a program that prints text files (e.g. source code, non-roffed text etc.) in a selected font and size." Scott Bradner (harvard!talcott!sob) mentioned that Harvard was also using Transcript to drive a Linotron 300P 2480dpi (!) laser typesetter which spoke Postscript. So, if 300dpi isn't enough.... My personal opinion: for a combined list price under $10K it sounds unbeatable. If my computer budget comes through this year, Hadron will certainly be acquiring one. If you have Suns, it just gets better. DISCLAIMER: I *still* haven't used Transcript, so everything you just read was condensed from the replies I received. A note to those people who were nice enough to respond to me: Thanks, and I hope I represented your views accurately. Scott --- T. Scott Pyne, Hadron Inc. UUCP: seismo!hadron!tsp