mpradhan@f.adelaide.edu.au (04/23/91)
There seems to be a lot of confusion about Apple Laser printers. It has been said: > The Personal LaserWriters as far as I know can not be attached to a PC > (except maybe through a network) since they don't have a parallel or > serial connenctor on the printers. The low end has just an Appletalk > connector and the high end ones have a SCSI connector as well. > > The two lower end models also do not support PostScript, but do > support TrueType and QuickDraw. Although TrueType will be supported > by Windows 3.1. QuickDraw is soley an Apple product. Basically the PostScript LaserWriters are the old NT and NTX, and the newer Personal LaserWriter NT (4ppm). These are poor value for money and will be replaced in June. The latest LaserWriter is the LS and it is much cheaper as it does not have PostScript. In fact it doesn't have anything - it does scalable fonts but these are imaged in the Macintosh ie. TrueType sits in the computer not in the Printer. Likewise drawings are imaged by Quickdraw in the Macintosh and the 300 dpi image sent to the printer. It is a bit more clever than it sounds as the driver has in-built compression and the page image is decompressed in the printer, so it only needs 512K RAM, it uses a serial port running at almost 1 Megabaud thro some trickery. When windows can support TrueType it can use the LS, or in fact any other printer without PostScript. Regards, Malcolm P.S. I have no attachment to any vendor, I've just been printer shopping lately. _________________________________________________________________ Malcolm Pradhan _--_|\ Medical Computing, Faculty of Medicine / \ University of Adelaide, South Australia \_.--._/ InterNet: mpradhan@f.adelaide.edu.au v Fax: + 618 223 2076