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
mbk@hpsemc.HP.COM (Miles Kehoe) (11/13/88)
ZZ: The Laserjet II can be hooked up to a mac in a couple of different ways. Personally, I've used one and wasn't wild about it; and I've spoken to several people who have used the other and liked it alot. The method I've used is to purchase a driver product for the Mac called 'Laser Printer Compatibility Software' from Printworks (purchased thru HP's direct-purchase line at (800) 538-8787. What this does is provide an installable driver under the Mac OS for Laserjet I/II... but sadly there is a great deal of software that doesn't go thru the drivers "legally". Hypercard was the biggest violator, and the real thing I wanted to do on the Mac. The solution was about $145 from HP. Since then, a number of friends have used the 'hardware' solution from a company called Orange Micro, down in Southern California I think (Anaheim comes to mind). They sell a smart cable for about $100 which plugs into the Mac port and looks (to mac) like a fast Imagewriter. The micro in the cable maps the Imagewriter codes to Laserjet codes abd sends stuff out the other end that the laser knows about and prints. I do *not* have answers to things like what is the aspect ration, what is the effective speed, and such... but I've heard good things there. As to the plotter - only a package from a company called Softstyle again sold by HP called Plotstart for $125. I can't tell you any more about it - I'd be sure to see about 'money back' if it doesn't work right. (You also might check with Cricket because I hear they have a program which drives the HP plotters). If you use them and like them, let me know! Miles Kehoe mbk%hpsemc.HP.COM
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.
bmartin@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