laser-lovers@uw-beaver (03/15/85)
From: Ken Mandelberg <km%emory.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Does anyone have any experience with Adobe's "Transcript" for postscript printers? Transcript is a Unix package of filters that allow printing of a variety of output on Postscript printers, including the Apple Laserwriter. It is supposed to support ditroff/troff(CAT)/plot/raster files on 4.2BSD. It sounds good. It also handles diabalo 630 files, so it would seem that Transcript should allow a Vax to do spooling for itself, as well as a variety of PCs that can produce WP output files for a diabalo, and download them to the Vax. Actually, the only thing I don't see how to do is print off a Macintosh without disconnecting the Vax manually. Apple is offering a good discount on the Laserwriter to universities in their consortium. It looks to me like the Laserwriter/Transcript combination provides a very affordable Troff Unix printer with very little limitation (except for volume of output). The HP seems much more limited for not that much less money. Any comments?
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (03/19/85)
From: jjhnsn@ut-ngp.arpa (J. Lee Johnson) I was going to reply that I have been trying for 5 weeks to get an informal but official bid from Adobe so that we could buy Transcript. The letter arrived via Federal Express while I was still reading Ken Mandelberg's posting. The good news is the site-wide source license that Adobe is offering for $2950. This is important to us. We were going to license just one Vax ($1795 source license). This means we will be able to run Transcript on our SUN's also. It means we can put one executable copy in a public area and not have to worry about which work stations can execute it. I wouldn't write off the HP LaserJet too quickly. HP has given us a pricing schedule that is better than the Apple consortium discounts. This means that LaserJets still cost less than half as much as Laserwriters! Sure, we recommend the Laserwriter, but the LaserJet makes laser printing affordable by every department. Our interest in $10K laser printers using the Cannon LBP-CX engine (Imagen and QMS) is waning rapidly. We've already lost interest in daisy-wheel printers :-) James Lee Johnson, U.T. Computation Center, Austin, Texas 78712 ARPA: jjhnsn@ut-ngp UUCP: ihnp4!ut-ngp!jjhnsn allegra!ut-ngp!jjhnsn gatech!ut-ngp!jjhnsn seismo!ut-sally!jjhnsn harvard!ut-sally!jjhnsn research!ut-sally!jjhnsn