s29749s@saha.hut.fi (Olli Johannes Arnberg) (04/22/89)
We have made a Macintosh printer driver for the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet. All the sources are available free of charge. They implement the full QuickDraw based printer interface. It is fairly straightforward to modify our driver for various other printers, too. The driver can use the DeskJet's great 300 dpi graphics. It makes the DeskJet a QuickDraw printer, with features and print quality resembling those of the LaserWriter IISC. For faster output lower resolutions (75, 100 or 150 dpi) can be selected. Program listings and other text-only documents can be printed with the draft option, which uses normal text printing (120 cps). The manual contains a thorough description of Apple's printing interface. We have found several non-documented features while programming our driver. In our manual we try to explain their essence and what to do when problems arise. The manual is an indispensable help for an application programmer, too. We have found that fairly many "good" programs do not adhere to standards (the manual is about 65 pages). If you want to improve our driver, feel free. We have given some hints where to start in our manual. These is another program for printing the manuals: BatchPrint. You can make a spool file with our printer driver and print it with any printer you choose afterwards. That means you don't have to have the original program. The driver itself, accompanied by sources and an extensive manual, is available via anonymous ftp from kampi.hut.fi (internet: 128.214.3.9). The directory is "/pub/HPDJ". The whole package will also be posted to comp.binaries.mac (binaries only) and comp.sources.mac (sources only). See comp.sys.mac for further details about the driver. Have fun, Ari Mujunen Olli Arnberg s29851c@taltta.hut.fi s29749s@saha.hut.fi Bug reports to: hpdj-bugs@hut.fi