josephs@ttidca.TTI.COM (Bill Josephs) (06/15/88)
It seems to me that there is a difference between characters printed on a "write white" laser printer vs. those printerd on a "write black" unit. When I print on my Okidata (write white, I think), characters appear less bold and often have some strange "jiggles" (the arms of a capital M in garamond, for instance, are wavy). On a LaserJet II (write black), this doesn't seem to happen (and I've never read any comment to indicate that other prople are suffering "wavy arms"). Has anyone investigated this further (all Ricoh engines are write white, I believe) and are their versions of the same font for the different laser engines? Bill Josephs Citicorp/TTI 3100 Ocean Park Blvd. Santa Monica, Ca. 90405
guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) (06/21/88)
The industry is certainly aware of this problem (my brother is getting a summer job patching up fonts for a company producing white-writing laser printers), but I believe there are quite a few LW clones on the market which, for obvious reasons, don't address the problem. Perhaps Adobe's PostScript font-producing algorithms are tuned for black-writing, which may be one of the reasons output from black-writing LW's looks better. -- Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam guido@piring.cwi.nl or mcvax!piring!guido or guido%piring.cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net
bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger) (06/26/88)
Not only PostScript output looks better in write-black. The TeX METAFONT fonts tend to, as well. Even fonts that are built-in look much better on out write-black LaserJets and LaserWriters than our write-white Imagen. I personally suspect that this may be because writing was developed on write-black systems. Pen and ink is write-black; so is traditional printing and the Linotype process. Is offset printing more analogous to write-white or write-black? -- _______________________ __Brian___________________ |Brian T. Schellenberger| "The Earth is but one | ...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts | |104 Willoughby Lane | country, and Mankind its |work: (919) 467-8000 x7783| |Cary, NC 27513 | citizens" --Baha'u'llah |home: (919) 469-9389 |