lemay@lorelei.Sun.COM (Laura Lemay) (08/30/89)
A bunch of people seem to be asking stuff about printing to the laserwriter, so here's a big posting to cover all the questions: 1. When I made up transparencies on my mac, they looked fine. When I brought them into the mac shop to be printed on the LW, they came out all wrong. Whats going on here? Although the Mac advertises as WYSIWYG, it is not necessarily so. Fonts that are displayed on the screen are not the same size/shape etc as the postscript fonts that appear printed on the LW. So the laserwriter reformats everything as best it can with the font it is told to use. (All right, LW hackers, thats not a scientific explanation, but it'll do.) The easy solution I've discovered for this is to pop a laserwriter driver into your system folder. If you are pressed for space, you don't need the laser prep, just the driver. Then, before you start working with any formatting, select the chooser from the apple menu (oh, you also need to install this DA if you don`t have it.) It'll ask you a whole bunch of stuff about appletalk and the laserwriter. NOTE: you do NOT need appletalk or a laserwriter or even a printer at all to do this. The goal is to make the mac THINK that its printing to a laserwriter. Then, the mac will try to use laserwriter spacing, etc and things should come out properly. 2. I've noticed the laserwriter doesn't print along the outer 1/4" of the page. Is there any way to change that? Nope. Sorry. Since the LW is such a small printer, it needs that space around the edges of the paper to pull the paper through. Its very irking, but its a fact of life. 3. How do I keep a startup page from printing when I turn on the laserwriter? This has been beaten to death on this bboard for a while now, but basically tehre are two ways to do it: 1. (If you're not a postscript hacker). Pull out the paper tray an inch or so when the LW starts up, until the orange light goes on steadily. 2. (If you are a postscript hacker). Damn. I thought I rememebred this one. Basically it involves getting into interactive mode with the laserwriter (or sending a script to the LW interactively), and changing a variable called "setdostartpage." Sigh. Is tehre someone out there who could write the actual script to be downloaded to the LW and post it? 3. I just did a paper using the "london" font, which I really like. But when I printed it on the LW, it said "Font London not found, using bitmap." London is right there on my system, why can't it find it? This was the most commonly asked question when I was managing a macintosh center in college. So here's my treatise on the subject: There are two types of fonts: screen fonts and printer fonts. The screen fonts are the ones you (obviously) see on your screen, and also the ones you install in your system file using font/da mover. These are called bitmap fonts, becasue they are made up of single dots (bits) on your screen. When you print on an imagewriter (this may have changed, I don't know how the new imagewriters work), these bits are downloaded directly to the paper. If a dot is black on the screen, it is printed on the page. So you can always print any font you want on an imagewriter. However, the laserwriter is infinitely different. The laserwriter contains a whole differetn set of fonts, called postscript outline fonts. These are mathematical descriptions on fonts, rather than bits. What fonts exist in your laserwriter depends on the particular laserwriter. None of them will have London. What your macintosh application does when it prints is send the NAME of the fonts down to the printer, and the printer calls up that piece of code for the font to print everything. If there isn't a match between the name the app sends it and the list of internal fonts, the LW will do one of two things -- it will substitute another font it knows (courier for monaco, times for new york, etc), or it will bitmap the screen font onto the page. When the laserwriter makes bitmaps, they will usually come out looking ragged and strange. This is because of the differences in resolution between the screen and the page. On the screen, there are 72 dots per inch (dpi). The laserwriter prints at 300 dpi. Some other printers can print at even higher resolutions (400, 1200, etc.). In any case, the size of a dot on the screen is a lot bigger than the size of a dot on the page. This is why fonts look ragged on the printer. There is a "font smoothing" option in many applications; sometimes this makes the fonts look better when printed, but often doesn't work very well at all. Your best bet is to stick to fonts that the laserwriter has in memory. On interesting quirk of having fonts in the laserwriter is that these mathematical formulas for fonts can be scaled to any size. You may only have four sizes of a particular font installed in you system, but you can print any size you want on the LW. Depending on the program you use, larger or wierd size fonts will either not be available or will come out looking really wierd on the screen. But they will look fine when printed. whew. Hope this has helped..... -Laura Lemay lemay%lorelei@sun.com Redhead. Drummer. Geek.
hallett@shoreland.uucp (Jeff Hallett x4-6328) (08/30/89)
In article <123914@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> lemay@sun.UUCP (Laura Lemay) writes: > >Although the Mac advertises as WYSIWYG, it is not necessarily so. Fonts >that are displayed on the screen are not the same size/shape etc as the >postscript fonts that appear printed on the LW. So the laserwriter reformats >everything as best it can with the font it is told to use. (All right, The easier way is to get the actual Adobe fonts. The Apple fonts differ slightly in spacing and style than the Adobe ones - enough to make them print differently. If you go over to CompuServe in the Adobe forum, you can get any screen font you want. Some of them are also on Sumex-Aim, through anonymous FTP. > >3. How do I keep a startup page from printing when I turn on the laserwriter? > >This has been beaten to death on this bboard for a while now, but basically >tehre are two ways to do it: > >1. (If you're not a postscript hacker). Pull out the paper tray an inch >or so when the LW starts up, until the orange light goes on steadily. > >2. (If you are a postscript hacker). Damn. I thought I rememebred this >one. Basically it involves getting into interactive mode with the laserwriter >(or sending a script to the LW interactively), and changing a variable >called "setdostartpage." Sigh. Is tehre someone out there who could >write the actual script to be downloaded to the LW and post it? The code is "0 serverdict begin exitserver statusdict begin false setdostartpage end". To make it print again, substitute "true" for "false". Even better is to get the Word document from Sumex-Aim that has this code built into it and send that when you want it off. Best is to get DiskTop from CE Software which includes a number of LaserWriter utilities, including ones to show the current LaserWriter status and toggle the startup page. >On interesting quirk of having fonts in the laserwriter is that these mathematical >formulas for fonts can be scaled to any size. You may only have four sizes >of a particular font installed in you system, but you can print any size you >want on the LW. Depending on the program you use, larger or wierd size fonts >will either not be available or will come out looking really wierd on the screen. >But they will look fine when printed. To paraphrase Chuq VonRospach, "Fixed in System 7.0" (somewhat). Good posting Laura. Someone should set their server to repost this every month. :^) :^) -- Jeffrey A. Hallett, PET Software Engineering GE Medical Systems, W641, PO Box 414 Milwaukee, WI 53201 (414) 548-5163 : EMAIL - hallett@positron.gemed.ge.com
casseres@apple.com (David Casseres) (09/07/89)
Just thought I'd clarify something here. Laura Lemay's hints are correct but the reasons she gives aren't exactly right. Two kinds of reformatting can happen when you print on a LaserWriter. There is gross reformatting where line breaks and page breaks are not in the same places as they were on the screen; let's call this "document reformatting." Then there is subtle reformatting where the spacing of characters and words _within a line_ is different; call this "line layout adjustment." Document reformatting happens when you create your document with one type of printer chosen and print it with another type of printer. It has nothing to do with fonts or Postscript; rather, it is caused by different dimensions of the printable area of the page for each printer. The application gets these dimensions from the driver software and places line and page breaks accordingly; if the type of printer changes, the application has to change these line and page breaks. Line layout adjustment happens whenever the printing resolution is not 72 dots/inch. When this is the case a different font must be used (either Postscript or bitmap) and the character widths are not exactly in the same proportions as the ones on the screen. The driver makes adjustments in the spacing between words and between characters within each line so as to make both ends of the line come out in the right places. Generally the adjustments are small and it takes a trained eye to see them (especially the character-spacing adjustments within words). If you use Adobe's screen fonts for Times and Helvetica, instead of Apple's, the amount of line layout adjustment is minimized because the character widths are more nearly in proportion to the ones in the Postscript fonts. But watch out! If you have a document that was created and formatted with Apple's screen fonts and you switch to the Adobe screen fonts, the document will get reformatted just as if you changed it to a different font altogether. Finally, a word on automatic font substitution. If you use Geneva on the screen (Apple's default), it will be printed with Helvetica on a Postscript printer. Likewise New York is converted to Times and Monaco to Courier. In these cases the character widths match very poorly indeed and the result is an ugly-looking document. It's too bad because Geneva, New York, and Monaco are more readable _on the screen_ than Times, Monaco, and Courier, which are more readable on paper at 300 dpi. A classic example of the problem of converting from one medium to another, and a real thorn in the side of WYSIWYG. David Casseres Exclaimer: Hey!