mec@mtfmi.att.com (M.CONNICK) (08/02/89)
I've received quite a bit of netmail asking about the MacPrint driver for the DeskJet so I've decided to go ahead and post this fairly long review of it. Overall, I'm VERY happy with it. We got it from Mac Warehouse for $79.00. MacPrint comes complete with printer cable! I wish I'd known that, as I'd bought an extra printer cable for $30.00 a couple of weeks before we got MacPrint. It also comes with Mac fonts for all of the DeskJet and LaserJet built-in and cartidge fonts, and Times, Helvetica, Courier, and Symbol QuickDraw fonts in sizes 9 through 96. Its handling of the built-in and cartridge fonts is really great. Whenever you select one of them in your documents, MacPrint recognizes them as HP fonts and sends the proper commands to the printer to utilize them. HP fonts and QuickDraw fonts can be mixed in the same document, even in the same line. It's interesting to raise the cover of the printer and watch what the DeskJet does when it encounters a line containing both QuickDraw and HP fonts. It actually draws the QuickDraw fonts first, and then goes back and prints the HP fonts in the line! The HP fonts support bold and underlined styles, and italics if the HP font features italics in it. Of course the speed of output when using the HP fonts is really impressive! MacPrint supports 75, 150, and 300 dpi output of QuickDraw fonts and graphics. The page setup and print dialog boxes are much simpler than the PD driver. The page setup box allows you to specify document size (letter, legal, A4, or envelope) and whether you're printing in portrait or landscape mode (it supports landscape mode even for the DeskJet). The printer dialog box asks for quality, quality mode, number of copies, and pages to print. The quality setting has choices for low, medium, and high, corresponding to 75, 150, and 300 dpi. The quality mode setting has choices for letter and draft and controls the DeskJet's ink setting. In fact the MacPrint driver completely ignores and overrides any switch settings on the DeskJet printer. The manual is very complete and well written. There's a "quick startup" section, as well as very detailed sections on installation and operation. There's a very nice chapter called Printer Optimization that really explains in great detail all the trades offs involved in using HP fonts vs QuickDraw fonts, and using the various quality modes. A very handy appendix is also included that showes what HP font cartridges you need to buy to support each available font, style, and size available. I've never seen all this information collected into a single table before and it's quite handy. Another nice little feature of the manual is that it tells you EXACTLY how to print out envelopes using the DeskJet. This isn't covered very well in the HP manual. Installation is simple, straight-forward, and very well documented. You just select the appropriate driver and copy it into the system folder. There are drivers for DeskJet, DeskJet +, and all of the various LaserJet models. Next you use their FontMapper program to generate the HP fonts needed. You just select built-in font and any cartridge fonts you have and click the Create button. The program then builds a font "suitcase" file that can be installed using the DA/Font Mover program, along with the QuickDraw 4X fonts provided. Finally you use Chooser to select the driver. This again displays a list of all of the cartridge fonts and you select which ones the driver should support. Finally clicking the Chooser Setup buttom brings up a box for selecting the baud rate and port used. The MacPrint program supports both 19.2K and 9600 baud, and of course strongly recommends using 19.2K baud. 9600 baud is provided in case you're sharing the printer with a PC only capable of 9600 baud operation. We've tried out MacPrint with most of our programs and it works very well. One surprise was that our ancient copy of MacWrite 4.5 won't work with it. Attempting to print causes an 02 system bomb. All of the other programs work fine, even including an old copy of Word 1.05. MacWrite version 4.6 also works without a problem. A big advantage over the PD driver is MacPrint's document size handling. I was always having problems with the PD driver trying to get output to come out correctly on a page. Lots of times I'd get lines dropped off the end of a document, or only the top half of the last line printed on the page. I was constantly fiddling with the document size settings in the PD driver's page setup dialog box. Also with the PD driver, I could never get output to appear close to the top of the paper no matter what settings I used in the Chooser Setup or page setup dialogs. With MacPrint all this hassle went away. Documents just print out fine with no hassle or fiddling with settings. The first line of a document can be set to come out right at the top edge of the page, if desired. MacPrint's superior handling of document sizes, along with the terrific HP font support, means we'll probably never use the PD driver again. All-in-all, at $79.00 I think MacPrint is a REAL bargain. I'll continue to experiment with it and let you know of any problems or "features" we encounter. ----------------------------------------------------- Michael Connick att!mtfmi!mec 201-957-3057 AT&T Bell Labs MT 3F-113 (Dept. 79153)