john@cbnews.ATT.COM (John P. Jagoe) (09/27/88)
Does anybody have experience with a driver from GDT Software or an alternative driver from Data Pak? HP gave me phone numbers for these 2 companies. I want to use one of their drivers to interface a Mac II to an HP Desk Jet. The main applications I am interested in are LSC 3.0, MacWrite, MacDraw II, MacPaint, PixelPaint, Excel, FullWrite, MindWrite... Thank you very much for any advice. John Jagoe.
erik@hpsad.HP.COM (Erik Kilk) (09/28/88)
As a programmer at HP with a Mac at home, I've been trying hard
to connect my Mac to an HP printer. I have yet to find something
really good. As soon as there is a good DeskJet driver for the Mac,
I'll buy a DeskJet.
I tried SoftStyle's Printworks. This is a gereric driver. They have
one for laser printers and another for dot matrix printers. I tried the
laser printer one on a friends HP LaserJet. It had several modes to
select how it would print. One mode mapped Macintosh fonts to the
printer's built in HP fonts. This produced the fastest output but
your margins and spacings wouldn't line up since the fonts weren't
exactly matched. Enhancements like bold, italic, etc. usually didn't
work. For just plain typewriter printing, it worked fine. Another
mode had the driver build up a bit image of the full page in the Macintosh
using the Macintosh fonts (helped if you had large fonts). This produced
exact printouts but was painfully slow. It also meant your LaserJet needed
lots of memory. My friend's would only print 1/4 of a page this way.
HP's ads imply the DeskJet should work with most LaserJet drivers. I haven't
tried this with SoftStyle's nor heard of anyone else trying it.
There is such a big potential here for a good driver that I just assume
someone will eventually write one. If someone reading this is, I have
two requests:
1) Use the DeskJet's data compression so it won't take
a half hour to print a 300 dpi page.
2) Have an option to redirect the output to a file. This
is so I don't have to have the DeskJet physically connected
to the Macintosh (I will have an HP workstation in between).
I want to be able to download the file to the workstation and
then I'll ship it out to the printer over LAN.)
Erik Kilk
Signal Analysis Division
Hewlett-Packarddumesny@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Alain Dumesny) (09/30/88)
In article <810001@hpsad.HP.COM> erik@hpsad.HP.COM (Erik Kilk) writes: > >As a programmer at HP with a Mac at home, I've been trying hard >to connect my Mac to an HP printer. I have yet to find something >really good. As soon as there is a good DeskJet driver for the Mac, >I'll buy a DeskJet. Have you tried the Grappler LS from Orange Micro ? They have adds claiming that you get laserwriter IIsc quality out of the deskjet. I haven't personaly interfaced one of those on a mac yet, but I am definitly looking into doing that because I really like the idea to have a 300 dpi output out of my mac with a printer which isn't expensive at all (especially after University discounts). But I don't know how well it interfaces with mac ??? Has anybody out there used the deskjet with a mac ??? PLEASE let us know ! ------ Alain Dumesny Cornell University dumesny@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu
dclemans.falcon@mntgfx.mentor.com (Dave Clemans) (10/08/88)
I've had very good results using a Grappler LQ to drive
a deskjet (on a MacPlus). Some notes:
you must have the deskjet powered up, the Grappler
interface powered up, and the deskjet online EVERY
time the Mac is rebooted.
They use the same technique as the Quickdraw laser
printers to get nice fonts, so getting the best
output depends on having the right font sizes
installed.
(At least with the unit I got) you can't leave the
Grappler interface powered up all the time; the
wall transformer powering it gets EXTREMELY hot.
dgc