info-mac@uw-beaver (09/12/85)
From: WEINSTEIN@BBNG.arpa
My preliminary report on using the QMS laser printer instead of an Apple
laserwriter was perhaps a bit too rosy. Here are some residual problems:
1. The smoothing algorithm does not work. In fact, you must turn smoothing off
when printing, or else nothing will come out of the laser printer at all.
2. The Postscript-equipped QMS laser printer is apparently incapable of running
at faster than 9600 baud yet. That means its speed is communications-bandwidth
limited, and it is excruciatingly slow (i.e., several minutes per page). I
suspect it is even worse in this regards than an Apple Laserwriter.
3. There is a bug in the laserwriter$_header file on info-mac. There should be
10 entries in the definition of "vrb" (lines beginning "/vrb"); instead there
are only 9 entries. The missing entry is another repetion of the entry
{eofill}; it should be inserted before the line {initclip eoclip newpath} in
the definition of "vrb". I got this out of the other version of this header
file archived on info-mac (laserwriter$_header.12, or something like that), but
I haven't gotten the latter to work yet for other, unknown reasons.
Unless this bug is corrected, it will be impossible to download bitmapped fonts
or print macpaint images, and the margin boxes of macwrite documents will
sometimes get printed as visible rectangles.
To get the Laserwriter driver, you must buy it from Apple. I do not believe
you needed to buy a Laserwriter to do this, since you need one driver per
Macintosh but many Macintoshes can share a Laserwriter. Also, there has been a
question as to what I meant by holding down the ^F key; I meant the Command-F
key, and one must press it and hold it down immediately AFTER clicking OK and
continue to hold it until the message "Creating Postscript file" appears.
However, until the speed problem on the communications interface to the QMS is
solved, I honestly do not recommend this arrangement for anything involving
printing of bitmapped images (including anything other than the built-in
laserwriter fonts).
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