laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/12/85)
From: phr%ucbernie@Berkeley (Paul Rubin) A new left-wing newspaper called the Berkeley Mirror showed up on the UCB campus a few days ago. It says that the body type is done completely on a LaserWriter, and some of the headlines and other stuff too. Some of the headlines look really crappy, almost as if they were done on a cheap dot-matrix printer using the normal Mac fonts, but the rest look okay. The body type is extremely crisp and clear, but the intercharacter spacing is uneven and sloppy-looking. This is probably as much the fault of the formatting software as the fonts themselves. The fonts, in my opinion, look okay but not great. Because the type is so clear, I suspect that the people at the newspaper did their laser typesetting in a very large point size and the photo-reduced it somehow. That would be supported by earlier claims on this list that the Postscript software in the Laserwriter does well at "normal" sizes (10, 12, etc.) but loses when the characters have to be scaled up or down by very much. Aside: some of the local photocopy places have started also making Laserwriter time available. I think it's a neat idea because they have just about exactly the right kind of experience in dealing with that kind of equipment (capital and operational requirements), and they are accessible to the masses. You put your flyer (article, termpaper, etc) together on your Macintosh, then pop your disk into their Mac and get typeset copy a few seconds later. One place (Krishna Copy at University & Shattuck in Berkeley, but this is not an ad) charges $.30 a page plus $10 an hour if you need to do editing, which seems reasonable to me. Another (Cleo's) has a more complicated pricing scheme where the minimum charge is something like $4.00 but then they'll make a certain number of free xerox copies for you. I hope this kind of service spreads.
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/12/85)
From: Bruce Brolsma <brolsma@bbn-spca>
We've had very satisfactory results with enlargements of the larger fonts on
the LaserWriter. We've done this using our beta-test copy of MacDraw,
choosing, for example, 48-point Times. One MacDraw option is to enlarge or
reduce by an arbitrary amount (within limits). You can then print your
"headline" at, say, 150%. We've gotten excellent results. Obviously the
resolution is restricted to what you can expect at 300 dots per inch (compared
to commercial typeset resolution that is much higher)--but there are NO
obvious jaggies! It looks quite professional compared to our old method of
using QMS QUIC-code lettering (though we like our QMS for its own strengths).
Without having seen their output, I suspect the Berkeley Mirror did not use a
process similar to what I've mentioned, somehow settling instead for "screen
dumps" at the Mac's 72 dot-per-inch res.
MacDraw, bless its heart, seems to also do a decent job of proportional spacing
on the limited text samples we've used it for. We're finding it an
extremely valuable time-saver for preparing art, logic diagrams, and
illustrations for our software documentation, while saving considerable
expense over the traditional art-department method.
-bruce brolsma