djs@ttrdc.UUCP (Dennis J. Svobod) (07/10/85)
There is apparently a bug in the Imagewriter driver when dealing with Italic , Outline or any type style that makes the characters bigger than normal. When printing in high- quality mode, the part of the character that extends further to the right than a normal character gets clipped at the right edge of the document. I didn't try this for 'regular' quality printing, but it is a real problem for high quality printing. It is particuliarly bad when you are using fully justified formatting, as a character from each line gets clipped. The image on the screen looks fine, but the printed version looks horrible. It makes the italic, outline and shadow styles practically USELESS. If anyone has a solution, or knows of a newer Imagewriter release please let me know. (the Imagewriter file I have is the one that came with the most recent Finder,System,MacWrite update.) Frank Owen ..ihnp4!ttrdc!djs ( a friends account ) or ..ihnp4!ttrdc!blue!fjo (my account)
lsr@apple.UUCP (Larry Rosenstein) (07/20/85)
I talked to the person who works on the Imagewriter driver about the
italics characters being clipped and about a problem reported
recently with overprinting in MacWrite. (The problem: type a
character that overprints; change font; type character to be
overprinted. Result is that the first character is missing on the
hardcopy.)
His answer was that the problem is with the application not the
printing software. The printing software simply captures a picture
of each page, images it to form a bitmap, and prints the bitmap. Any
optimizations (to eliminate whitespace, for example) are done on the
bitmap, so if a character did not appear it was because the
application did not draw it properly.
Some applications try to set the clipping when they draw, but do not
take into account the fact that italics characters extend further to
the right. The overprinting problem might be caused by MacWrite trying
to do an erase (because of the font change), which wipes out the first
character.
You might try a different program (Microsoft Word instead of MacWrite,
or the memory-based version of MacWrite instead of the disk-based
version), and see the same thing happens. Also, be sure that you are
not mixing up old/new Imagewriter files with new/old System files. At
some point in the recent past, the print manager was changed to
support multiple printer drivers. (This probably occurred with the
System Update.)
If you can isolate the bug, send me a short file that demonstrates it,
and I wil try to report it. (Be sure to mention what version of
software you were using.)
Thanks.
--
Larry Rosenstein
Apple Computer
UUCP: {nsc, dual, voder, ios}!apple!lsr
CSNET: lsr@Apple.CSNET