chuq@sun.uucp (Chuq Von Rospach; Lord of the OtherRealms) (11/08/86)
I'm about to buy a laserwriter for my own uses at home (OtherRealms is going to turn into a nice, expensive hobby before I'm through) which brings up all sorts of interesting questions that I thought I'd throw out to the group mind. First of all, am I going to have trouble hooking it up to my system? I'm currently running a Paradise hard disk off of the printer port, an Imagewriter/Thunderscan and a modem off of an A/B switch on the modem port. Appletalk also plugs into the modem port, right? Does this mean I'm going to have to go to an A/B/C/D switch, or is this going to a real hassle? (note: since the LW can't do mailing labels, I can't completely retire the Imagewriter, although the Thunderscan may be retired soon). Question #2. How well in reality does bitmapped (i.e. MacPaint) art and graphics reproduce? Am I (as an example) going to want to upgrade to SuperPaint so I can do Postscript graphics? Has anyone played with the new Postscript clip art starting to come out? Is SuperPaint better than MacDraw? What are the tradeoffs? Question #3. Does anyone know of a grahics librarian for PICT stuff? Picturebase (?) does it for macpaint bitmap stuff, but not for macdraw format graphics. Am I stuck with the Scrapbook for now? Question #4. What are your favorite laser fonts? Now that I'm not going to be limited to 72dpi, I want to pick up a few distinctive typefaces for some of my stuff. I particularly would like to find a good London style Old English font, if it exists. What other fonts are available, and which ones do you like? Question #5. What do you recommend for things like custom font/logo/graphic design? If I want to develop my own font characters and dingbats, what should I look at using, assuming I want PostScript and not bitmap characters? Question the last. With the laserwriter coming in, I'm thinking it would be a Good Thing to start using honest letterhead instead of pinfeed with a bitmap letterhead logo for stuff. Any suggestions on kinds of paper (also colors and tints ) that work well in a laserwriter? What sort of thigns should I plan on avoiding (textured papers, for instance...). Does the printer have trouble with heavy (say 20lb) paper? thanks for the help, in advance (this should get some interesting dicussion going, I hope!) chuq