ZHAZHIA@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (11/09/88)
LaserJet Serial II and a HP 7550A Plotter to a Mac? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. Zhiping Zhao Phys. Dept., Yale U. ZHAZHIA@YALEVM.BITNET ZHAZHIA@YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU
kehr@felix.UUCP (Shirley Kehr) (11/14/88)
In article <97@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu> ZHAZHIA@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu writes: > Does anybody in this newsgroup have any idea how to connect a HP >LaserJet Serial II and a HP 7550A Plotter to a Mac? Any suggestions are >greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. > > Zhiping Zhao Orange Micro makes a connector that lets you use any 24-pin dot matrix or HP-compatible laser or ink jet printer as if it were an ImageWriter LQ. MacWareHouse lists the Grappler L/Q for $92. MacConnection would probably have the same price.
twakeman@hpcea.CE.HP.COM (Teriann Wakeman) (11/16/88)
MAC=>HP PLOTTERS
There are several plotter drivers on the market. More drawing applications
are starting to include them as part of the application.
My personal favorate that I hace been using since 1986 is MacPlotsII by
Computter Shoppe in *Carolina. Another driver is MacPlotts by MicroSpot,
an English company. I have not looked at it lately but I have been told that
it is reaonably good & worth looking into. SoftStyle from Hawaii, is in my
opinion the one to stay away from.
More about MacPlottsII
There are 2 versions. Business vers supports desktop HP plotters. Professional
version supports desktop & the floor standing big birtha plotters. It plotts
from the clip board or anything saved in PICT format. MacPlottsII supports
pen switching {read as multiple colours}, hidden lines, and several fonts &
some patterns.
You will probably have to special order any plotter application. The Mac
Imagewriter cable will work. But there will be a handshaking line missing.
Instructions come with MacPlottsII on how to make your own cable. Mine is
15 feet long. I find plotters to be too noisy to put next to my Mac.
MAC=>LASERJET
Softstyle of Hawaii makes a driver. It isn't very Maclike, but I understand
that it has improved over time. A LaserJet only makes sense if you already
have one AND do not have a real Mac printer AND you are planing to print
text only using HP fonts from a HP cartrige or internal ROM. Why do I say
this? 1. The LaserJet is SLOWWW at 300dpi graphics. There is NO smothing.
graphics and Mac fonts at even 300 DPI will look like they were produced
\on an Imagewriter with a new ribbon. Text only using HP fonts look good
and print quickly.
TeriAnn
enbmartin@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Brian Martin) (11/16/88)
In article <97@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu> ZHAZHIA@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu writes: >LaserJet Serial II and a HP 7550A Plotter to a Mac? Any suggestions are >greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. > Consider Printworks for the Mac. I used it for almost a year to drive a LaserImage 2000 with an HP LaserJet emulator card. I eventually replaced the LaserImage with a LaserWriter II/NTX, because of a growing need for postscript support. The package includes a serial cable and software drivers for Canon, Xerox, Qume, Nec and HP laser printers. They also provide a RAM-based print spooler, which is useful if you're one of the few people with >2MB RAM. Their software turns the HP LaserJet into a 75/150/300dpi ImageWriter. In 300 dpi mode, fonts 4x the size of the screen fonts are scaled down to generate 300dpi fonts. If I'm not mistaken, the LaserWriter SC uses a similar method to generate high-resolution text. You will probably want a hard disk since those 48pt fonts do eat up a lot of disk space. They also support a letter-quality mode which lets you map screen fonts to the printer's resident fonts. In this mode, ASCII characters are sent directly to the printer at 19,200 baud, which lets you drive the printer at its rated speed (I was getting close to 10ppm out of the LaserImage). This mode is real useful for dumping large database and program listings to the printer. For example, I occasionally print out 250+ page documents, and in letter quality mode I could print out 250 pages in under 30 minutes. My NTX isn't anywhere near as fast. Their software is smart enough to preserve tab settings and font styles such as bold, underline and italic in letter quality mode, so that you can use the printer's resident helvetica and times fonts, and have properly aligned multi-column text. It also lets you mix printer resident fonts with bit maps and with graphic objects. Their high resolution mode uses a smoothing algorithm for bit maps. Caveats: 1) The printer needs at least 1MB RAM, because in 300 dpi mode, the printer driver creates a 300 dpi image of the entire page before downloading it to the printer. As my printer had 1.5MB, that was never a problem. 2) You must use their installation disk; you can't simply drag the printer drivers into the System Folder. 3) I ran into difficulties trying to print from HyperCard. They told me that it was a known problem, caused by HyperCard apparently bypassing some sort of standard print routines. Otherwise, I was very pleased with the product. 4) For best results, get the large fonts off of the LaserWriter SC font disk, or off of the ImageWriter LQ font disk. 5) You have to use Copy II mac or the SUM's Quick Copy to back up the oirginal diskette. For some reason, I couldn't make a Finder copy of the original diskette and then use the backup as an installation disk. (Quick Copy did say something about the disk being an 800K MFS disk) Summary: I really like the product. It worked well on a Mac II running System 6.0., and was really unbeatable when using the laser printer as a substitute for a high speed line printer. Hope this helps. ---- Brian