ondich@stolaf.edu (Jeff Ondich) (05/07/91)
I need help. I bought a Personal LaserWriter LS last week. When I use commercial software, the speed is slow but tolerable (about 1 page/minute for straight text in MS Word 4.0). When I print from my own programs, the speed for straight text goes down to about 1 page every 3 minutes. This is not tolerable, and I need to figure out what's going on. My system is: Mac Plus, 2.5M, 40M hard drive (SCSI). My program takes up about 1.2M in memory (mostly a nasty big hunk of data). When I print to an ImageWriter, a typical page takes 15-20 seconds to draw. When I print to the LaserWriter LS, the same page takes about 90-120 seconds to draw. After that 90 seconds, I assume that the driver is turning my page into dots and sending them off to the printer. If I am correct, there is little I can do to shorten the dot-making time. But I should be able to make the drawing go more quickly. I have noticed that during the drawing phase, my hard disk is being accessed a lot. Is this an artifact of TrueType? Would it help to have bitmapped fonts available in addition to TrueType fonts? Are there certain QuickDraw commands that are particularly expensive with TrueType? (For example, although my pages are straight text, I make a lot of calls to MoveTo() and DrawString()--should I try to cut back on these calls?) Well, you get the idea. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Jeff Ondich St. Olaf College Math Department ondich@stolaf.edu (507) 663-3115