omh@nancy (Owen M. Hartnett) (02/12/88)
How do you trick the laserwriter into printing closer to the edge of the
page than what it's supposed to?
I know you can do it, because Excel does it (not that Excel is a paragon
of programming virtue).
Let me say that I have a good reason for wanting to do this, and it would
be under close control. [i.e. not under the power of the casual user,
as Excel's printing is.]
Finally, a plea to Apple:
Please, please, open up your printing manager to the general [read: developer]
public. If you really want to get *securely* entrenched in the business
world, you've got to have a variety of output devices. Look, we've got
160MB and bigger hard disks now. What are we going to print all this
information on that we've been storing on them? Imagewriter's too slow and
laserwriter's duty cycle too low.
*You need a high speed output device* Either a band printer, or good high
speed dot matrix capable of some fast printing. You don't need to make
this a box that does fancy graphics - straight text is fine.
Owen Hartnett
Brown University Computer Science
omh@cs.brown.edu.CSNET
omh%cs.brown.edu
{ihnp4,allegra}!brunix!omh
"Don't wait up for me tonight because I won't be home for a month."
-W.C. Fieldsearleh@eleazar.Dartmouth.EDU (Earle R. Horton) (02/14/88)
In article <22751@brunix.UUCP>, omh@nancy (Owen M. Hartnett) writes: ... > Please, please, open up your printing manager to the general [read: developer] > public. If you really want to get *securely* entrenched in the business > world, you've got to have a variety of output devices. Look, we've got > 160MB and bigger hard disks now. What are we going to print all this > information on that we've been storing on them? Imagewriter's too slow and > laserwriter's duty cycle too low. > > *You need a high speed output device* Either a band printer, or good high ... The Macintosh Printing Manager has been fully (yes, fully) documented by Apple. A number of commercial software publishers have managed to come out with functional printer drivers for the Macintosh which print text and/or graphics on anything from a Brother typewriter to a Hewlett-Packard pen plotter to commercial addressing machines to high-speed line printers and probably even one of those 3M thermal things I had when I was an undergraduate. Writing a Printer Resource file is easy; there is even an article in MacTutor magazine showing how to do it, with all the source code supplied and pictures for the faint of heart. I get calls all the time from guys with high-priced, high-speed paper munchers who have one hooked up to a Mac+ running my driver and couldn't be more thrilled. I wrote the d*mn thing because I was tired of hearing precisely the kind of belly-aching exemplified by the above comments, and I never, ever, expected to hear any more such in this or any other forum. It is the developer community which is at fault, and not Apple, for the apparent shortage of printer drivers for the Macintosh. Disclaimer: I have no connection with MacTutor magazine, other than as a one-time (to date) contributing author. -- ********************************************************************* *Earle R. Horton, H.B. 8000, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755 * *********************************************************************