lloyd@axecore.UUCP (Lloyd Buchanan) (09/06/89)
Still seeking the elusive upgrades to my NTX. As my collection of fonts seems to grow, the printer seems to slow proportionally. Does anyone have experience with memory/hard disk upgrades for the NTX? When this printer first came out, a big deal was made of the fact that only Apple hard disks would work with it. Is that still the case? Are memory upgrades available and worth the money? All responses greatly appreciated. Please email, I will summarize responses if appropriate. ----------------------------------------------------------- Lloyd Buchanan uunet!axecore!lloyd Axe Core Investors Axe Castle (914) 333-5226 (phone) Tarrytown, NY 10591 (914) 333-5203 (FAX)
herbw@midas.STS.TEK.COM (Herb Weiner) (09/09/89)
I have a Rodime 60 which works just fine with my LaserWriter II NTX. The Apple LaserWriter Font Utility allows you to download fonts to the hard disk. The LaserWriter II NTX also builds its font cache on the hard disk, so printing is slightly faster (with a hard disk) for ROM fonts and significantly faster for downloadable fonts. Recommendation: Spend your money on a hard disk, not on more RAM. Note that the font must be read from disk into ram when it is actually used, so if your documents use more fonts than will fit into RAM (i.e. you use "Unlimited downloadable fonts in a document" from the page setup dialog), you would need to continue to use this option even if you have a hard disk on your printer. Herb Weiner (herbw@midas.STS.TEK.COM)
c8s-an@franny.Berkeley.EDU (Alex Lau) (09/09/89)
Only hard disks that support a certain SCSI command (the "size" command)
will work with a LaserWriter NTX. At first, only Apple drives supported
the command; later, other drives started to support it, too.
However, if you get a hard disk, I'd recommend you get more memory as
well. The LaserWriter keeps a listing of the font names in RAM, and this
slows down printing if you've got something like the Adobe Font Library
hard disk attatched to your printer.
--- Alex
UUCP: {att,backbones}!ucbvax!franny!c8s-an
INTERNET: c8s-an%franny.berkeley.edu@ucbvax.berkeley.edu
FIDONET: Alex.Lau@bmug.fidonet.org (1:161/444)gelphman@adobe.COM (David Gelphman) (09/14/89)
In article <17006@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> c8s-an@franny.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Alex Lau) writes: >However, if you get a hard disk, I'd recommend you get more memory as >well. The LaserWriter keeps a listing of the font names in RAM, and this >slows down printing if you've got something like the Adobe Font Library >hard disk attatched to your printer. >--- Alex This is not correct, the LaserWriter does not keep a list of disk font names in RAM. What is true is that versions of the Apple LaserWriter driver prior to version 6.0 had performance problems with printers with lots of fonts available. If you use a printer with lots of fonts on the disk (such as Adobe Font Folio(tm), then make sure you upgrade to version 6.0 of the LaserWriter driver. David Gelphman Adobe Systems Incorporated
c8s-an@franny.Berkeley.EDU (Alex Lau) (09/15/89)
In article <1190@adobe.UUCP> gelphman@adobe.UUCP (David Gelphman) writes: >In article <17006@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> c8s-an@franny.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Alex Lau) writes: >>However, if you get a hard disk, I'd recommend you get more memory as >>well. The LaserWriter keeps a listing of the font names in RAM, and this >>slows down printing if you've got something like the Adobe Font Library >>hard disk attatched to your printer. >>--- Alex > This is not correct, the LaserWriter does not keep a list of disk font >names in RAM. What is true is that versions of the Apple >LaserWriter driver prior to version 6.0 had performance problems with >printers with lots of fonts available. If you use a printer with lots >of fonts on the disk (such as Adobe Font Folio(tm), then make sure you >upgrade to version 6.0 of the LaserWriter driver. >David Gelphman >Adobe Systems Incorporated This is partially untrue, as well. BMUG uses LaserWriter and Laser Prep 6.0 all the time, and the Font Folio (tm) slowed down the NTX with 2 Megs of RAM considerably. Where it used to take 30 seconds to image a page, it was taking 2 minutes. That's what I consider a major slowdown. And once the hard disk was disconnected and the LaserWriter was cycled, everything was fine and dandy and as fast as ever. I was told then that the problem was that the font names were stored in RAM, and that impaired the imaging speed. That's where I got my info; where'd you get yours? :-) --- Alex
gelphman@adobe.COM (David Gelphman) (09/16/89)
In article <17227@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> c8s-an@franny.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Alex Lau) writes: >In article <1190@adobe.UUCP> gelphman@adobe.UUCP (David Gelphman) writes: >>In article <17006@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> c8s-an@franny.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Alex Lau) writes: >This is partially untrue, as well. BMUG uses LaserWriter >and Laser Prep 6.0 all the time, and the Font Folio (tm) >slowed down the NTX with 2 Megs of RAM considerably. > >Where it used to take 30 seconds to image a page, it was >taking 2 minutes. That's what I consider a major slowdown. >And once the hard disk was disconnected and the LaserWriter >was cycled, everything was fine and dandy and as fast as >ever. I was told then that the problem was that the font >names were stored in RAM, and that impaired the imaging >speed. >--- Alex I don't understand why the print times were slowed so much if they were really using LaserWriter/LaserPrep 6.0 and the appropriate version of PrintMonitor (which also comes on the Apple Color disk w/LaserWriter 6.0). What the Apple printshop does at the beginning of the job is query the printer for all available fonts. If you have a printer without a disk, typically this is 35 font names or so. If you have a printer with Font Folio(tm), then this can be 500 font names or so. Prior to LaserWriter driver version 6.0, the method used to extract the font names from the printer and store them on the Mac for use during the print job took a considerable amount of time when the list of fonts was large. Times of a couple of minutes were not unheard of. This was improved quite a bit with LaserWriter 6.0. It isn't clear to me that the amount of RAM in a printer affects this part of the process in any significant way. If indeed there is a problem then there is probably something unusual happening that hasn't been uncovered yet. Again, I strongly suggest that users of printers with significant numbers of fonts available, upgrade to LaserWriter 6.0. Of course I suggest that most everyone do so as well ;-) Hope this helps, David Gelphman Adobe Systems Incorporated