chee77@jane.uh.edu (02/07/90)
I've been asked by a friend with a mac and a PC to post this. He wants a printer that will work with both machines, of high quality - comparable to an HP Deskwriter or cheap laserPrinter. It seems to me that it would be better to go with a PC standard printer, and make it work with the mac, say a deskJet, than to get a Deskwriter and try to get it to work on the PC, for several reasons. 1) Parallel port is faster, so get a serial->parallel converter for the mac, like the grappler. 2) PC printers are cheaper. The difference in price between a deskJet+ and deskWriter will pay for the grappler. 3) The printer driver on the mac is system level rather than application level. If you get it to work for 1 mac application, it will work for all (postscript excluded). On the PC, it would be a new battle for each application. I don't know much about pc's which may or may not be obvious from what I've written above. If anyone has tackled this problem before I'd appreciate hearing what you did and how it worked. If you are using a PC printer on a mac, does it work well? I've used the deskJet/Writer as an example, but by no means is that the only desired printer type. We'd certainly be interested in a high quality dot matrix or low cost laser printers. Thanks for the help. Fred Schulz Chemical Engineering University of Houston