emuroga@m.cs.uiuc.edu (08/08/88)
I recently hooked up a Grappler LQ to a MacII and Epson LQ800. The Grappler comes with an Imagewriter LQ printer driver and a spooler which does the translations. Also included are 3 fonts which approximate courier, helvetica, and times. The Grappler LQ box has 4 dipswitches to set for the printer that you hook up. There are about a dozen supported. The manual states that the Grappler LQ will make the connected printer emulate an Imagewriter LQ, and no more. Postscript is obviously not supported. In all cases, the output was as good as the Imagewriter II, although I have never seen Imagewriter LQ output. One strange thing I noticed was that a lower case "r" was printed at the upper left corner of the first page. I will report if the problem is found. The near-letter quality of the Epson 24-pin printer is only found if you use one of the three supplied fonts. This is a problem with Microsoft Word, because the fonts don't appear in the font menu. There is a short note in the manual that states that some programs like Microsoft Word use their own printer drivers, and will not work properly with the supplied driver. (Output with Word looks no better, if not worse, than Imagewriter II output) The manual suggests changing the dipswitch on the Grappler LQ to a parallel printer rather than Imagewriter LQ for programs using their own printer driver. I have not tride this yet. It seems the Grappler LQ will let you hook up a dot matrix printer to your mac, and if you use the supplied fonts, can make use of the high resolution of 24-pin printers. Eisuke Muroga University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ARPA emuroga@m.cs.uiuc.edu CSNET emuroga@uiuc.csnet USENET uiucdcs!uiucdcsm!emuroga BITNET emuroga%m.cs.uiuc.edu@uiucvmd.bitnet
wliao@pnet06.cts.com (Willy Liao) (08/11/88)
It should be noted that the first release of the fonts disk for the Grappler LQ has a problem with the font IDs. Noteably, they conflict with Apple's fonts; each Apple font conflicts with its analog. In other words, SWA Dutch has the same ID as Times, SWA Swiss has the same as Helvetica, and SWA Courier has the same as Courier. This is not a problem unless you use Suitcase, which currently doesn't resolve font ID conflicts. Be sure you use Font/DA Mover to move all of the fonts into one file so that they are renumbered, and then move them wherever you want. The documentation in the first release makes no mention of this, so you should be aware of it (it was an oversight on Orange Micro's part--they will register their fonts in the next release of the fonts disks). As for fonts not showing up in MS Word--well read the help file (command-option-plus to add a font to the menu, just use that and click on the font name in the Character Format box). UUCP: hodge.cts.com!pnet06!wliao ARPA: hodge!pnet06!wliao@crash nosc.mil INET: wliao@pnet06.cts.com