maher@clio.sts.uiuc.edu (Patrick Maher) (05/17/91)
TeXhax@cs.washington.edu writes: >In texhax 91:021, Bill Lennox (glennox@calstate) requests information >about dvi drivers for hp deskjet and apple deskwriter. A driver for the >DeskJet is available at the user-friendly price of $50 from Arbortext Inc, >Ann Arbor, MI. Their phone no. is (313) 996-3566. This driver is the driver that comes with Kinch's turbo tex, which is just a compiled version of the Beebe driver for the original laserjet. It cannot print direct to the printer; you have to first print to a file. Since deskjet printing is done by sending a bitmap, this makes the driver useless for large jobs, and unnecessarily slow for small ones. So, you definitely should not buy this driver. (I made that mistake.) Next I shelled out $120 for Personal TeX's driver, which works well, except it had a bug that prevented it printing many pages. Seems each page printed took up some memory that was not released, so depending on how many TSR's I had loaded, the program would say there was not enough memory after printing 20-40 pages. At the time (about a year ago) the people at Personal TeX verified that there was this bug, but showed no interest in fixing it. Coincidentally, I got a cold sales call from Personal TeX today. I told this person I was very unhappy with the way they treated my problem with their deskjet driver. After some checking they called back to say the problem has been fixed in the latest version. They're sending me a copy. We'll see. But since the driver that comes with emtex is supposed to work, I'd surely try that first if I were looking for a deskjet driver now.
russell@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Russell J Fulton;ccc032u) (05/17/91)
maher@clio.sts.uiuc.edu (Patrick Maher) writes: >But since the driver that comes with emtex is supposed to work, I'd surely >try that first if I were looking for a deskjet driver now. I have been using the emtex dvi driver on the deskjet with out any problems. It just goes... ( In the version I have you use /d option on the standard laser jet driver. I am bit vague because I set it up months ago in a .bat file and have not looked at it since!) Cheers, Russell. BTW we use modified Beebe driver on our bigger systems. (Vaxes etc.) -- Russell Fulton, Computer Center, University of Auckland, New Zealand. <rj_fulton@aukuni.ac.nz>
wwm@wa8tzg.mi.org (Bill Meahan) (05/18/91)
In article <1991May16.202152.11406@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> maher@clio.sts.uiuc.edu (Patrick Maher) writes: >TeXhax@cs.washington.edu writes: > >>In texhax 91:021, Bill Lennox (glennox@calstate) requests information >>about dvi drivers for hp deskjet and apple deskwriter. A driver for the >>DeskJet is available at the user-friendly price of $50 from Arbortext Inc, >>Ann Arbor, MI. Their phone no. is (313) 996-3566. > >This driver is the driver that comes with Kinch's turbo tex, which is >just a compiled version of the Beebe driver for the original laserjet. >It cannot print direct to the printer; you have to first print to a file. >Since deskjet printing is done by sending a bitmap, this makes the driver >useless for large jobs, and unnecessarily slow for small ones. So, you >definitely should not buy this driver. (I made that mistake.) > Why not just get the Beebe code, hack the program and compile it yourself? I did just that for my little 3B1 (aka UNIX-PC) because it seemed patently ridiculous to create a (multi-) megabyte file of the bit image, then 'cat' it to the lp spooler which immediately makes its OWN copy (yes, I know that there is a command-line option to prevent this) and prints from that. A couple of simple substitutions of 'popen' for 'fopen' (with the appropriate arguments) produced a dvi driver that pipes its output directly to the lp spooler. I could just have easily opened /dev/rawlp and had the output go directly to the printer if I had wanted to bypass the spooler (ok as long as nothing else wants to print). Should be equally easy for you PC folks. Since the output code is part of the common stuff for all the drivers in the Beebe kit, this approach is equally applicable to ANY of the drivers. If you can't hack C (this is C Programming 101 stuff, not tricky hacking) or don't have a C compiler, you can probably find a somebody locally who would do the job for a container or two of their favorite beverage (mine's iced tea - lots of tea, lots of ice :-) Of course, your mileage may vary. -- Bill Meahan (WA8TZG) | Programming is simple: wwm@wa8tzg.mi.org OR | uunet!mailrus!sharkey!wa8tzg!wwm | All you have to do is put the right "Home for Cybernetic Orphans" | numbers in the right memory locations!