rokicki@POLYA.STANFORD.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki) (06/15/88)
[ So many people have asked me about this printer . . . ]
It's a great little printer; output quality is incredibly good
for a machine under 1K. Speed is okay using the built-in fonts
(2-3 pages per minute). But as a printer for TeX, well, I'm having
a little trouble.
The machine is incredibly slow at dumping raster graphics at 300
dots per inch. Using all the tricks I can think of for skipping
white space and compressing the data, I can only get page times of
from two to six minutes. And it's not that it takes that long to
send the data; after all the data has been sent, the thing continues
to churn away for more than a minute. The RAM cartridge does not
appear to help.
At 300 dpi, the printhead only prints strips 15/300'' high, instead
of the 50/300'' it is capable of. (RAM cartridge doesn't change
this.) Even so, it takes 2-3 seconds per pass. Again, not because
of the data transfer rate.
The downloaded font format is sufficiently brain-damaged that it
will take a minor miracle to use this capability with TeX.
The printer is just a glorified dot-matrix printer, instead of a
nice page printer.
Damn it folks, even you dot-matrix folks, give us page capability!
I want vectors, rectangles without having to draw them myself. I
want downloadable fonts of arbitrary size, offset, and escapement.
It takes another kilobyte or so of code, and some more memory, but
it makes the printers so much more useful.
Did HP purposely slow this printer down when doing raster graphics
so there would still be a market for the LaserJet Series II? In my
humble opinion, it would have been fairly easy to give the thing
*complete* HP LaserJet Series II emulation at two pages per minute
(with the extra RAM cartridge.) Anyone want to fill this gap?
The output quality is magnificent, and if you are patient, it
actually does well as a TeX printer.
[ He shuts up after a long day of hacking . . . ]--
/-- Tomas Rokicki /// Box 2081 Stanford, CA 94309
/ o Radical Eye Software /// (TAMU EE '85) (415) 326-5312
\ / | . . . or I \\\///Join CCFFAALW---Concerned Citzens
V | won't get dressed \XX/Fighting For An Acronym-Less World