pacheco@uicbert.eecs.uic.edu (Mario Pacheco) (06/01/91)
I have an Epson EPL-7000 which is basically HP Laserjet IIP compatible, can you hook up laserjets to Macs? What commercial products are available? What do they cost? How about hooking up a Laserjet III to a Mac?
john@newave.UUCP (John A. Weeks III) (06/03/91)
In article <1991May31.223322.11501@uicbert.eecs.uic.edu> pacheco@uicbert.eecs.uic.edu (Mario Pacheco) writes: > I have an Epson EPL-7000 which is basically HP Laserjet IIP compatible, > can you hook up laserjets to Macs? What commercial products are available? > What do they cost? How about hooking up a Laserjet III to a Mac? Sure you can, you can hook almost anything up to a make. Making it work is more of a trick 8-). You will need a cable. Try a MacPlus to ImmageWriter 1 cable, it works for me. You will need to tell the printer to look at the serial port rather than the parallel port (unless you buy a parallel port card for your Mac). You can set the printer to 9600 baud, but look to see if you have a 19200 speed on your printer. The comm speed is very important. You will also need to set your printer over-run buffer as large a possible (otherwise it will fill up before the Mac knows to stop sending stuff). Memory. My EPL-6000 came with 512K, which is about 1/2 of the minimum needed to run with the Mac. 512K lets you do light word processing, and 3/4 page of graphics in high-res mode. Next, you will need a driver. There are two ways to go--postscript and non-postscript. The non-postscript way is the easiest and cleanest interface. Buy MacPrint 1.2 or later. This gives you a chooser level driver for the printer, and several fonts. The fonts are clones of Helvetica, Times, Courier, and one other that I forget. You will probably want to use Adobe Type manager because the free fonts are not real good. I have problems making justified type look good, and underlines look poor without ATM. If you want postscript, there are two ways to go. You can try Freedom Of The Press. I use the light version of FOP. It comes with the printer software and driver for the EPL-6000, check to see if it supports the EPL-7000 before spending $. FOP comes with a bunch of laser fonts, and works with all my other laser fonts. It is fairly speedy on my IIsi, but nowhere near as quick as a real postscript printer. The other PS option is to get a PS cartridge for you EPL. I have not looked into this option yet. Overall, I get good results with the EPL-6000, but it is real slow--usually about 1-3 minutes per page. It is fine for me, but this would not work in a production envrionment. -john- -- ============================================================================= John A. Weeks III (612) 942-6969 john@newave.mn.org NeWave Communications, Ltd. ...uunet!tcnet!newave!john