milne@uci-icse (Alastair Milne) (02/21/85)
We recently acquired the new IBM QuietWriter for use with our
Sanyo MBC-550. It most certainly is quiet, reasonably fast (6-800 baud,
perhaps?), and produces very high quality print, better than I've yet seen a
laser printer do; furthermore, its printable characters include all the
special characters of IBM's set, both below ASCII 32 and above ASCII 126.
However, a couple of questions arise:
1 - Can the thing print bi-directionally? I see no mention of it
in the manual, which suggests that it can't; but I live in hope.
Does anybody know?
2 - Has anybody tried configuring (or "installing", as they call it)
WordStar to use it (particularly, to get boldfacing and underlining)?
The method WordStar uses right now beats the print head to death, and
you need a good imagination to see any results. Regrettably, though the
QuietWriter has an underlining command sequence (which WordStar doesn't
use), it has nothing specifically for boldfacing. I am prepared to
write a printer program which respects WordStars formatting commands,
but uses the QuietWriter's control codes intelligently. However, I
don't need more work to do than I already have. Is there a way of
getting WordStar to cooperate? (And is it actually less work than
writing my own program? I am less than impressed with WordStar's
installation program).
Please send directly to me. I'll try to summarise to the net.
Thanks in advance,
Alastair Milne