paulo@ux.cs.man.ac.uk (Paulo L de Geus) (02/15/89)
From: pv9y@vax5.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: cheap good printers
Date: 9 Feb 89 00:05:44 GMT
Reply-To: pv9y@vax5.ccs.cornell.edu (Adam Engst)
Drivers: There are two major ones, the Printer Interface III from DataPak
and the Grappler LQ from Orange Micro. I tested both. The speed is almost
I see from your posting that you did not have the right thing to test. The
Grappler to use is "Grappler LS", which is not a hardware piece, only a
software driver with a normal serial cable (DB-25).
I understand that the Grappler LQ works at 216 dpi (3x font sizes) and is
aimed at 24 pin printers, whereas the Grappler LS works with the DeskJet
and HP LaserJet compatible printers.
With the Grappler LS output is outstanding at full 300 dpi (4x font sizes),
a normal A4 page full of text at 12 point generated by Microsoft Word
prints in 6.5 minutes, including 30 seconds for the mac II to generate the
bitmap, for the download to start and for the printer to arm the sheet of
paper in place.
I had a problem for some time, the first page(s) printed in a session would
render useless due to garbage appearing after a few lines. I finally found
out that the problem was due to incompatibilities among the fonts installed
in my system. Font Harmonize (or something like that) provided with
Suitcase was enough to get rid of the garbage printing problem.
I'm using Suitcase II 1.2.2, and have a huge list of fonts available,
although only the ones provided with the Grappler LS print at full
resolution. They are Courier, "Dutch" and "Swiss" at up to 72 pt, which
means that the largest font at 300 dpi you can print is 18 pt. By the same
logic, the largest possible font at 300 dpi is 31 pt (31*4=124, close to
the maximum allowed by the system, which I believe is 127 pt).
MacDraw, Excel and Word work OK, but I've only had more experience with
Excel. Very occasionally it prints a leftover of a character previously
deleted from a cell, close to the last character of the new string you
typed in place (using 33% reduction in the page setup). Don't know whose
fault it is, grappler's or quickdraw's.
I'm only waiting for a postscript clone or PD version to be cloned to the
mac environment (why is it that for the PC you have at least 3 clones
already, and none for the mac?). An alternative would be to have outline
fonts implemented in the mac system, I heard it was being done.
--
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Paulo L de Geus JANET: paulo@uk.ac.man.cs.ux
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