mjv@iris.brown.edu (Marshall Vale) (12/14/89)
My continuing plunge into the ATM world has netted (pun not intended)
these further comments, suggestions, and intangables.
Let me state my system again: MegaST2 (2megs), ICD host adapter,
65 meg RLL HD (Seagate 277R), external SF314 drive which will read
Mac disks while the internal won't but that's another posting, running
Spectre GCR 2.3, System 6.0.2 (no multifinder, and sound turned off)
and Epstart Epson printer driver 2.5 with a Star NX-10 printer.
I finally did some printouts to see how they looked. This included
some good and bad news. First the bad (jeez, I'm mean).
On some printouts, especially low point size, the descenders of letters
such as 'g' or 'p' were cut a little. It turns out that you have a
trade off to choose. After finally consulting the manual (tryed to put
that one off as much as I could to act like a normal mac user), I
found out that you can either have ATM cut a bit off the descenders and
have your line spacing retained or vice versa (full descenders as opposed
to untrue line spacing.) The clipping might not happen on higher
resolution printers (300dpi DeskJet, etc..) since it has more room to
print. It did happen on my Star NX (which is a 9-pin) but it wasn't
that bad. Noticable, but not an eye sore.
The good news is that large point sizes come out fantastic. I printed
out "Atari ST" in 4 different fonts, landscape mode, at 127 point size
from MacDraw2. It took around 12 minutes to finish (mind you it is also
converting the ImageWriter to Epson codes, that's the Epstart overhead,
your mileage will vary). People were hard pressed to believe that the
print out was from a 9-pin. At a casual look, people thought that it
was laser printed. Not bad at all. Of course the smaller one gets,
especially around 20 pts and less, people start to notice the jaggies
but are generally very impressed. I did another print out of a document
with three sentences all with varying multiple styles and point sizes (all
were under 25 pts though.) That one took around 4 minutes. The Pagemaker
3.0 document of medium complexity took around 8 mintues. Not bad.
There has been recent gripping about the manuals that one gets with the
ST's but those are wonderful technical manuals when compared to the ATM's
manual. It basically covers installation and recites much from Apple's
own manuals as to how to do things. Its repeatative at that too. It has
a large Q/A section in that back (the whole manual is about 30 pgs!)
which goes to show you how many problems that expected people to have with
it. Virtually no technical info as to how it works. The most informative
info is in the Q/A section (an extra card with Q/A's was also added) and
the read me file. I was very disappointed with the manual. It makes one
really appreciate the time that David Small puts into his manuals. His
are the only manuals that I have gone back and read because they were
fun.
Here comes another ATM oddity (actually its more like font oddity in
general). When you normally select a font and choose a style for it, let's
say bold for example, for screen display the Mac will do some QuickDraw
fattening of the font to make it look bold. It is however, not a true
bold font. If you have ever taken a look at the list of fonts from a
PostScript printer you will notice fonts such as _Times roman_,
_Times Bold_, _Times BoldItalic, and _Times Italic_. Each one is in fact
a seperate font ( you can derive outline and shadow from those.) Now
when you select bold the normal mac way we've all gotten used to, ATM
intercepts in and calculates it. The result is a rather ugly looking
change to the font you are using. It also appears to be as 'light' as
the plain style of the font. The print out will come out bold however.
To get a true, nice looking bold screen font, you must install the
font called 'Times Bold' for example. If you were to use italics then
you'd install 'Times Italic' etc... This starts to suck up disk space
and makes you font menu look like a mess. You don't have to install
those screen fonts to get them to print out correctly, you can just keep
their outline fonts installed in the System folder and ATM will try
to make decent looking screen version (bold is the worst looking) but
if you want true screen to printer look, then you should install those
extra screen fonts/styles. Its all up to your tolerances.
And finally, Adobe Type Manager costs $99 and that comes with Times,
Helvetica, Symbol, and Courier. The Plus font pack costs $198 for a
limited time and that gets you all the other fonts that are in the
LaserWriter Plus. ATM only works with System 6 or later and those who
have only 1 meg should seriously think twice before getting it (I'd
recommend not to if you have 1 meg.) Those withOUT 128K roms can't
use it because of the System 6 barrier.
Congradulations for making through my message, you have lots of patience.
All comments, questions, or rants about how much money my message cost
you can be directed to the address below. Enjoy!
-- mjv@iris.brown.edu
[opinions expressed, and there were lots of them, are mine only]
"And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red india-rubber ball."
A.A. Milne "Now We are Six"dsmall@well.UUCP (David Small) (12/19/89)
My thanks for the very kind comments concerning Adobe Type Manger and Spectre GCR! We have also had many positive responses on other systems. Frankly, I'm glad I wrote the software the way I did -- no patch files -- so new products could run after the software was cast in concrete. I did notice two things I might help with. First, we have seen *some* (not all!!) problems with internal Mega disk drives and GCR. Typically, the innermost tracks, 64-79, do not read properly. This appears to be due to horrific electrical noise inside the Mega. Mark Booth (STACE on GENIE) has extensively commented on how to produce a shield; it takes some thick aluminum, like cookie-baking stuff, and a few minutes of time. In 100% of cases, he has been able to fix internal drive problems, and he's up to 20 or so drives now. Next, MultiFinder is *not* stable, alas, under 2.3K. We have finally discovered why. As you know, there's a big problem with Mac software storing into location 0, a program fault. The stores cause a bus error, a crash I usually recover from. Well, on a hunch, we set the incircuit emulator to check for *reads* from locations 0 and 4, which do not cause a crash. (See, on a Mac, 0-7 are read/write RAM except on powerup; on the ST, they are ROM). Well whoops! Multifinder, through ROM calls, is *reading* location 0, and getting 602e1e00 (if I remember right), then plugging it into various critical memory tables. The result is a crash is not far off. The solution is to forbid the ROMs from doing that by simple entry checks for location=0 on these calls. Three were involved if I remember right. This greatly, greatly stabilized Multifinder, and to our complete surprise, MicrosoftWord 3.02. That was the bug in Word (out of memory) that I had been chasing over a year and failed on. Well, it works now. Anyway, I want to caution you on Multifinder. It is not yet stable on 2.3K. (Note: The "about Spectre" on 2.3K says 2.0 -- our fault.) We have fixed this in 2.5a, and ran it extensively at Comdex for a week with zero crashes, except for one known-multifinder killer D/A. We would commonly have 5-8 applications going at once. If you have a strong need for it, we could probably arrange a quick-release of 2.5A. It also features on-line configuration (press HELP and a config page pops up; use F1-F10 to toggle features) and some other goodies. Doug is also rewriting the launcher for some pretty stunning stuff. -- hope this helps, -- thanks, Dave / Gadgets
remco@tnoibbc.UUCP (Remco Bruyne) (12/19/89)
In article <15095@well.UUCP> dsmall@well.UUCP (David Small) writes: > >My thanks for the very kind comments concerning Adobe Type Manger and Spectre > [(exciting) stuff deleted] > If you have a strong need for it, we could probably arrange a >quick-release of 2.5A. It also features on-line configuration (press HELP >and a config page pops up; use F1-F10 to toggle features) and some other >goodies. Doug is also rewriting the launcher for some pretty stunning stuff. A strong need ? You shouldn't have mentioned this! Can you ship this yesterday ? (ARC-ed and UUE-ed is fine with me) BTW :-). Remco -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Remco Bruijne USENET: remco@tnoibbc PHONE: +31 15 606437 ------------------------------------------------------------------