pv9y@vax5.CIT.CORNELL.EDU (02/09/89)
For those who are looking for a good quality, cheap printer for the Mac, but but aren't afraid to be a little odd, I would recommend the HP DeskJet. Dave Platt tested it extensively a while ago and posted his findings. I have some further comments now that I own one. Speed: Anywhere between 30 seconds/page and 6 minutes/page, depending on how good quality you want. It's up to you. If you want to print in the highest quality all the time, it will be a slow printer. 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 exactly the same, although there may be small individual differences. The DataPak driver works with the font cartridges, but those are expensive and only have one (or occasionally two) sizes. If you want to print twleve point Times a lot, then buy the cartridge, otherwise it's a waste. Also, the DataPak does not work with ALL the cartridges, most notably not with the cartridge that gives you 3 or 4 sizes. The Grappler probably works with a few more applications since it patches into the ImageWriter LQ driver, but that has it's own problem (which was the main reason we didn't buy it). Because it uses the same driver as the ImageWriter LQ, the ouput looks strikingly like it was printed on an ImageWriter. Yuck, that's what I'm trying to avoid. Two advantages to the Grappler: it comes with a cable included, and it comes with some large font sizes included, neither of which are included with the DataPak. Price: The DeskJet itself was $607 on educational discount at Cornell. It's only slightly more expensive at good discount places. The Grappler is a little under $100, with cable and extra fonts. That DataPak is $125, plus $20 for the cable. (no discounts as far as I know) Fonts: Both drivers want to have 4X fonts installed for 300dpi printing. So if you want to print in 12 point, you must have 48 point installed. It is VERY hard to find large point sizes. There are a few options. Make them yourself in ResEdit (probably virtually impossible). Use the Times and Helvetica that come with the ImageWriter LQ, if you can get your hands on them. Use the scaling features of Fontographer (should work but I haven't tried it). Use FontSizer, a $100 program from US Microlabs I think. FontSizer is the best possibility, but it requires a PostScript laser to download the fonts to and resize them, and it may be illegal to use fonts created with FontSizer on a non-Postscript printer. I personally think their market lies in the LaserWriter SC crowd, who must be fuming because of the difficulty of getting decent print out their laser. The DeskJet produces nicer output than the LaserWriter SC in many cases, by the way. I tested it too. Don't try to use the PD program FontDoubler, it doesn't work at all. Compatibility: Most programs are fine. I'll list some I know don't work here, but my list is at home. MacDraft and Canvas 1.0 print boxes around text, QuicKeys won't print templates, Quark Xpress 1.04 cuts off the last letter in each line and bombs unpredictably, SuperPaint 1.1 bombed, even though SuperPaint 1.0 prints fine. Excel is a bit weird (so what's new), and Word is even weirder (equally as expected from the program from Hell). HyperCard and MacPaint both bomb, but it's a known fact that Bill Atkinson's programs have strange ways of accessing the printer. That's about it, I think. There might be one or two more that don't work, but I don't think so. Oh, those compatibility problems are with the DataPak driver. The output from the Grappler was too ugly and ImageWriter-ish for me to even consider it seriously. Any other questions, please feel free to ask, though I may take a bit to reply since I'm pretty busy now. Adam Adam C. Engst pv9y@vax5.cit.cornell.edu "You can never step into the same text twice." pv9y@cornella.cit.cornell.edu
mkhaw@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Mike Khaw) (02/09/89)
Dave Platt and I conducted a "print-off" between the DataPak driver
(his) and Grappler LS (mine) on a Mac II driving a HP DeskJet.
We found that each had its own quirks. The DataPak driver was somewhat
faster, and was able to print closer to the edges of the page, but as
far as print quality goes, we didn't find any appreciable differences
if you were using the same 4x fonts with each driver.
Grappler LS doesn't take advantage of font cartridges, but comes with a
print spooler. I bought it instead of the DataPak driver because at
the time I'd heard that the latter had problems with MacWrite, and
MacWrite is what I have and expected to print from most often.
Bugs I've noticed with Grappler LS: If you try to select print
reduction from MacPaint's Page Setup dialog box, the printer ends up
spitting out blank pages forever. Selecting "#10 envelope" from the
IW/LQ Page Setup dialgue box in MacWrite seems to have no effect: I
expected it to let the printer print closer to the top and left of an
envelope, but no go. When I had only 1 Mb RAM in my SE, trying to
print a MacWrite document that contained lots of rulers and font
changes would cause a bomb (I forget the bomb id), but now that I have
2.5 Mb, that appears to have gone away. Finally, during our
"print-off" Dave tried to print from WriteNow, and we got (vertically)
squashed letters.
Recently, GDT Softworks announced JetPrint(?) for the DeskJet. It is
supposed to use "outline font technology", implying that you don't need
4x bitmap fonts. There is also another company coming out with
"MacPrint", which is supposed to translate QuickDraw into HPGL and
drive both LaserJets and DeskJets.
Mike Khaw
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hardcopy: Teknowledge Inc, 1850 Embarcadero Rd, POB 10119, Palo Alto, CA 94303kd@sfsup.UUCP (K.Delbarre) (02/10/89)
In article <17924@vax5.CIT.CORNELL.EDU>, pv9y@vax5.CIT.CORNELL.EDU writes: > For those who are looking for a good quality, cheap printer for the Mac, but > but aren't afraid to be a little odd, I would recommend the HP DeskJet. > [ ... ] > 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 > [ ... ] > the DataPak does not work with ALL the cartridges, most notably not with the > cartridge that gives you 3 or 4 sizes. [ ... ] Some time ago I played with a friend's DeskJet and Printer Interface II, which I assume is the previous release of PI III. As distributed, it did not work with the "TmsRmn ASCII" and "Helvetica ASCII" font cartridges, but ResEdit showed the reason. PI II contained a list of string resources that told it how to select font cartridges on the DeskJet based on the name and point size of the font(s) in your document. I think (based on fairly old memories) that the name of the resource was the font name concatenated with the size, and the contents of the resource was a string containing the escape sequence(s) to send to select the appropriate cartridge, font size, etc. As distributed, it was configured so that any size of Times would select the "TmsRmn" cartridge -- which as you noted only contains one or two font sizes. Using ResEdit, I set up its list of resources so that it would select the "TmsRmn ASCII" cartridge instead, and it worked just fine. This cartridge contains 8 font sizes, but only has the ASCII character set. If you use any weird and wonderful Mac characters they're essentially truncated to seven bits and you get what you get. I don't know if Printer Interface III retains this mapping scheme, but if you go in with ResEdit it'll be fairly obvious. I was thinking of buying PI III myself (anybody know a discount mail-order place that carries it?) but now that second- -generation drivers with outline fonts are coming out, I may hold out a while longer. Kelvin Delbarre, AT&T Bell Labs, Summit, NJ attunix!kd