FXDDR@ALASKA.BITNET (03/09/88)
Of course not long after asking if anybody had heard about Migraph postponing
the PostScript driver for EasyDraw, along comes the first Migraph newsletter
in months, called "HEADLINES". In it:
Q: Where are your Postscript and color printer drivers?
A: We are working our buns off at Migraph and there always seems to be some
project taking priority over others. All I can say is we all hope to
have them available in the first half of 88.
Anyway I'm playing with Axel's excellent MFPS program so I don't know if I'll
need Migraph's driver (maybe somebody at Migraph saw MFPS and felt theirs
was superfluous). I hadn't known that he had a Unix version of MFPS, and
running it on the Vax which has the PS printer makes a lot more sense than
doing it on the ST and transferring huge PS files to Vax.
The newsletter might interest non-EasyDraw users. It was produced on the
(in)famous Atari laser printer (though of course mass-produced by another
process). And, page 6 was produced with the new Deskjet printer. Seeing the
two types of output side by side there just isn't a whole lot of difference.
Don't know if the mass production improved or degraded the quality of the
originals, but they both look very good. Migraph is pushing the Deskjet
themselves for $949, including GDOS drivers.
Since Migraph has GDOS drivers for HP Laserjet and now the Deskjet, that
would seem to eliminate the only real argument for the Atari laser printer
("GDOS is available for the Atari laser, will any of the cheaper ones have
support"). And: "The Deskjet gives you beautiful full-page 300 dpi graphics
without needing additional memory (you can hook it up to a 1Mb ST)." Same
is true for many of the < $1500 lasers. So I don't see that the Atari laser
has a future...
What would be very useful for the bitmapped lasers would be an interface to
the ST DMA port so 300 dpi images could be loaded into the printer in a minute
or two instead of the 10+ minutes it takes to load the HP Laserjet via the
parallel port.
Don Rice
FXDDR@ALASKA.bitnet
"There's nothing wrong with this place that saturation bombing couldn't cure."