rcd@cbnewsj.ATT.COM (rana.c.dutt) (01/12/90)
In article <2866@cuphub.cup.edu>, kar7481@cuphub.cup.edu (Dan Karbowsky;AtariEliteOfPghPa bbs412-384-5609) writes: > Could you please tell me SPECIFICALLY what hardware/software you're using > and especially where you got the driver for the PAINTJET!!!??? > > This MAY change my mind.....(from LJ-II to PJ)... Let me talk about the ways ST programs talk to printers, and then let's see how these ways relate to the HP Paintjet, OK? The first and simplest way is for the program to use the text mode of your printer only, and forget about the graphics mode. You get to tell the program what escape sequences it needs to print bold, italics, compressed, etc., but the important thing is, you're limited to the printer's own internal fonts and capabilities in text mode. First Word and Wordwriter ST are examples of programs that fall into this category. If you'd be happy with a 10-point Letter Gothic font, which is a font that the Paintjet has built in, then using one of these programs will produce 180-dpi NLQ text mighty speedily. And besides the black text, you can print colored text in 6 other colors. You can do this by mapping some Wordwriter ST modes to color escape sequences, e.g., I mapped the light, superscript, and subscript modes (which I don't use) to red, blue, and green. Anyway, writing a driver for these types of programs is easy. The second way a program can print is to use GDOS along with the graphics mode of the printer. So, if you need fancy fonts, you specify them in your ASSIGN.SYS file, and GDOS will map them to the best possible resolution for your printer. EasyDraw, Timeworks DTP, and Wordup are all examples of programs that use GDOS for output. Alas, there is no GDOS driver for the Paintjet, to my knowledge. If programs like these are important to you, don't buy the Paintjet! (I have the HP Deskjet also, and, fortunately, both Neocept and Migraph have very good GDOS drivers for the Deskjet/Laserjet series; if 300 dpi laser quality output is important to you, get one of these printers instead.) A third way a program can print is to use the graphics mode of your printer, but bypass GDOS, and use its own graphics-producing schemes. Pagestream 1.8 is in this category. It comes with a whole slew of printer drivers including an excellent one for the Paintjet. This program is powerful enough to be a wordprocessor and object-oriented drawing program all by itself, not to mention it's excellent page layout capabilities. But what really makes it stand out is it's ability to represent hundreds of colors internally, import Degas, Neo, and Amiga HAM format color pictures with the palettes intact, and print them beautifully to the Paintjet. It also has a color postscript driver for people with color postscript printers. Not only that, it comes with outline fonts (not bitmapped) so you can get arbitrarily big, tall letters with no additional disk space! Summary: If you really need brilliant color output and 180 dpi text in the same device, get the Paintjet. You can use the programs I mentioned, and you'll be happy. If you need a printer that has good GDOS support, and color is not important but 300 dpi laser quality is, get the Deskjet/Laserjet. Rana Dutt rcd@mtqua.att.com