jao@k.cc.purdue.edu.UUCP (04/13/87)
Question: How easy is it to use a non-ImageWriter printer to a Macintosh? Recently I've had a couple of questions at work (I work at the campus computer center here at Purdue University) about doing this. Making cables to inter- face printer to Mac is no problem; I'm wondering how well the Mac TALKS to non-Apple printers. Often people see the light and upgrade from PCs to Macintoshes :-) but want to keep their old printers. Others want alternatives to buying the IW II. Are printer drivers available for other printers? Do they allow reasonable speed/quality output of all Mac fonts and graphics as the IW does? Anyone here actually hooked up a non-IW printer to a Mac? I'm curious to know what you had to go through to use it without compatibility problems. Thanks in advance for any replies. John O'Malley ----------------------------------------------------------jao@k.cc.purdue.edu Personal Computing Learning | Math-Science B-4 | West Lafayette, IN 47907 Resource Center (PCLRC) | Purdue University | (317) 494-1787 ext 271 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
wetter@tybalt.caltech.edu.UUCP (04/15/87)
About printer drivers: The people to talk to when it comes to printer
drivers is SoftStyle. They make two drivers for the mac to use the HP laserjet
and thinkjet printers on the macintosh, and by now they might have more.
In addition Microsoft Word 3.0 comes with a serial printer driver for the
mac, which is fine if you only want to print straigt text. Also the draft
mode of the image writer print box prints in text mode instead of the standard
graphics mode. Other then that you either have to write your own driver or
find a printer which supports the IW command set.
Pierce Wetter
VIRGO (Aug 23 - Sept 22)
Learn something new today, like how to spell or how to count to
ten without using your fingers. Be careful dressing this
morning. You may be hit by a car later in the day and you
wouldn't want to be taken to the doctor's office in some of
that old underwear you own.
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wetter@tybalt.caltech.edu
--------------------------------------------earleh@dartvax.UUCP (04/15/87)
In article <1999@k.cc.purdue.edu>, jao@k.cc.purdue.edu.UUCP writes: >Question: How easy is it to use a non-ImageWriter printer to a Macintosh? ... >I'm wondering how well the Mac TALKS > to non-Apple printers. The answer to this question depends entirely on what you want. The Mac has a decent set of serial drivers, so that any program that knows how to send ASCII codes out a serial port can probably work with a standard serial printer. If you want draft quality output, then there are a number or programs that can be made to work with almost any printer. I have a Tandy printer, and I began printing from the Mac with Microsoft Basic 1.0. Then I wrote a desk accessory in TML Pascal to do the job, and finally got smart, ported a real text editor to the Mac, and made it capable of printing its buffers to either serial port. I included choice of baud rate and serial port, plus choice of line-terminator character. If you want to print a MacPaint document, or even a MacWrite document in "draft" mode, then we begin to enter the twilight zone. Programs that are written according to the "Macintosh User Interface Guidelines" (I would put this phrase in bold, shadowed, italic, but I can't.) never talk to the serial port directly, but rather use a printer driver as an intermediary. Printer drivers for standard printers cost from $100 to $400, and are well worth it, considering the complexity of the code involved. Basically, the poor programmer has to rewrite QuickDraw, the Macintosh graphics package, for each printer supported by the printer driver. In addition, the information needed to do this has been removed from the new editions of Inside Macintosh, according to report (I still use the "Phone Book"). Also, the only way to test a printer driver is to drag your cable, printer, etc. to the dealer's office (assuming he is nice enough to allow this sort of thing) hook it up, and actually print something. It's not like a program, where you just go in, borrow the demo copy, and slip the disk into one of the demo machines for a five minute "test drive" of the program. There are a lot more logistics involved in finding out whether a printer driver will actually work for your printer than there are in finding out if you "like" a word processor. WYSIWYG, but you have to pay, first.
zben@umd5.UUCP (04/16/87)
One of our people has an ancient Apple printer he bought with his Apple ][+.
It has a parallel Centronix interface. He bought a serial to parallel box
and I built a cable to connect it. Once the printer was physically connected
the only thing I had to do was give him the very latest copy of the printer
driver resource from the system file.
Before I gave him the latest printing resource the problem looked very much
like handshaking - it would work fine on short printouts or at the beginning
of long ones, but a ways into a long print job it would start to garbage out.
The new resource may believe in XON-XOFF handshake as well as the standard
DTR (what Apple calls "hardware handshake").
--
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Ben Cranston zben @ umd2.UMD.EDU Kingdom of Merryland UniSys 1100/92
umd2.BITNET "via HASP with RSCS"tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu.UUCP (04/18/87)
>Question: How easy is it to use a non-ImageWriter printer to a Macintosh?
I have an HP LaserJet Plus running with my Mac. I use Softstyle's
Laserstart printer driver; Softstyle also makes drivers for Epson and
other printers. The rest of this note describes my experience with the
Laserstart driver; you can probably extrapolate some of this to their other
drivers. (I don't know if anyone else writes Mac printer drivers; the
information required is *not* present in Inside Mac, though I've heard
that it was published in the original "Phone Book" edition.)
The results are mixed. It *works*, but there are some annoying
properties. The primary thing you have to accept is that what you
have is an Imagewriter emulator, i.e. you get either 75 or 150 dpi
resolution; you don't get to take advantage of the printer's 300 dpi
capability. In particular, any program that has LaserWriter-specific
features doesn't function, because the LaserJet doesn't understand
PostScript. For example, SuperPaint prints just fine in Imagewriter
resolutions, but you can't use its "LaserBits" 300-dpi feature.
Also, certain programs tend to do things that are appropriate for the
Imagewriter but not for the pseudo-Imagewriter LaserJet. SuperPaint
insists on initializing each new document with a Page Setup record that
specifies "Tall Adjusted" mode; you have to explicitly go in and change
that to "Tall" mode to get reasonable behavior with the LJ. I've
noticed that MacWrite sometimes moves page breaks when you tell it
to print, though I can't be sure that this is the fault of the printer.
The printer driver has a special "text" print mode in which it just
sends ASCII (not bitmaps) to the printer, relying on fonts present in
the printer. This gives you effectively 300 dpi for text only, and is
very fast; but it is inherently not WYSIWYG, since the Mac's screen
fonts don't quite match the spacing of the LaserJet's fonts. I tried
making a program to download a Mac font as a LaserJet soft font, and
*still* could not get the spacing to match exactly; the LaserJet's
treatment of spacing just isn't the same as Quickdraw's. (The results
would be satisfactory for ragged-right-margin documents, but I wanted
justified margins, and the printed right margin was visibly irregular.)
Eventually I gave up on the text mode; now I just use the bitmap modes,
which at least produce output that looks like what's on the screen.
(I also recall suffering a system crash when I tried to print a Finder
Catalog in text mode, which further soured me on the text mode. That's
the only major bug that I've found, though.)
Another complaint is that it's ungodly slow; over 30 sec/page in 75 dpi
resolution, 2 or 3 minutes/page at 150 dpi. Part of this is simply
that you have to ship a lot of dots down a 19200 baud serial line; but
I also found that Softstyle did some extremely dumb things in the
printer driver. (Example: sending a printer reset command at the top
of each page. This is unnecessary, and it stops the LJ dead in its tracks
for about 10 seconds. Also, some of the inner loops in the driver,
executed once *per bit* of image, were incredibly inefficient; would
you believe dozens of NOP instructions?) I modified the driver a little
bit to get rid of some of the stupidities, and it now runs significantly
quicker; but it will never be able to run at the LJ's rated speed of 8
sec/page. On the other hand, I hear that LaserWriters don't run at
8 sec/page either.
Recently Softstyle has been advertising an upgraded "Laserstart Plus",
which does print spooling among other things. I don't have that, so
can't say if it's worth the extra money, nor if it fixes any of my
complaints.
The bottom line: you can do it, and it works, but you have to live with
being outside the design center. That means coping with various
peculiarities and perhaps not being able to run some programs. In my
case it is worthwhile 'cause I already had the LJ; if I were buying a
printer for the Mac, I would definitely spend the extra money for an
Apple-blessed printer.
tom lane
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BITNET: lane%zog.cs.cmu.edu@cmuccvmaprgclb@ihlpa.ATT.COM (Blesch) (04/20/87)
In article <1022@zog.cs.cmu.edu>, tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu.UUCP writes: > >Question: How easy is it to use a non-ImageWriter printer to a Macintosh? I'd like to know the opposite. How hard is it to connect a non-Apple computer (e.g. an AT&T PC6300) to an Apple Imagewriter II? I believe the IW's port is a standard serial port, but it has that funny circular connector. Is it simply a matter of getting a cable with a standard serial RS-232 connector on one end and the Apple plug on the other? Carl Blesch
dgold@apple.UUCP (David Goldsmith) (04/21/87)
In article <3647@ihlpa.ATT.COM> prgclb@ihlpa.ATT.COM (Blesch) writes: >I'd like to know the opposite. How hard is it to connect a non-Apple >computer (e.g. an AT&T PC6300) to an Apple Imagewriter II? I believe >the IW's port is a standard serial port, but it has that funny circular >connector. Is it simply a matter of getting a cable with a standard >serial RS-232 connector on one end and the Apple plug on the other? Yes. An Apple // to Imagewriter // serial cable should do nicely. (Remember, Apple //s use standard RS-232 connectors (at least the //e does).) -- David Goldsmith Apple Computer, Inc. MacApp Group AppleLink: GOLDSMITH1 UUCP: {nsc,dual,sun,voder,ucbvax!mtxinu}!apple!dgold CSNET: dgold@apple.CSNET, dgold%apple@CSNET-RELAY BIX: dgoldsmith
zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) (04/25/87)
It was just a matter of an appropriate cable to connect an IW to a
CalComp serial interface on our Apple ][+. For long printouts it was
necessary to connect DTR so output could be throttled...
--
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Ben Cranston zben @ umd2.UMD.EDU Kingdom of Merryland UniSys 1100/92
umd2.BITNET "via HASP with RSCS"