tgl@g.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane) (09/29/90)
Lately there's been a lot of questions about using HP LaserJet printers with Macintoshes. I've answered a bunch of 'em, and now have decided to try to prepare a definitive statement that would answer most such questions. What follows is a first cut at same. I'd appreciate any comments or corrections by e-mail; when this is reasonably fleshed out, I'll repost it and send it to Sumex and other archive sites. There are several products that I have not personally used, notably MacPrint, Grappler, and the Pacific Data PostScript-clone cartridge. If you have experience with any of these, or know of something that I have not mentioned, please help me fill in the blanks! Note: I've crossposted this to quite a lot of newsgroups, in hopes of attracting the attention of people with useful info. Future postings will appear only in comp.sys.mac.hardware and maybe comp.periphs.printers. Please direct any followup posts to comp.sys.mac.hardware only. -- tom lane Internet: tgl@cs.cmu.edu UUCP: <your favorite internet/arpanet gateway>!cs.cmu.edu!tgl BITNET: tgl%cs.cmu.edu@cmuccvma CompuServe: >internet:tgl@cs.cmu.edu ---------- CUT HERE ---------- Using HP LaserJets with Macintoshes revised 28-Sep-90 This document tells about using Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printers with Macintosh computers. LaserJets are a good bit cheaper than Apple's laser printers, and are very high quality machines with a good company behind 'em; furthermore there are a heck of a lot of them out there, so a lot of people find themselves wanting to use one with a Mac. LaserJets (hereafter LJs) are not directly compatible with Macs, but there are several different add-on or third-party products that make it possible to use them with Macs. The plan here is to explain all these different products to help you decide which one to use. This discussion applies to the HP LaserJet line, which presently includes: * Series I: the original LJ, LJ Plus, LJ Plus 500. * Series II: LJ II, LJ IId, LJ IIp. * Series III: presently LJ III, LJ IIId; LJ IIIp is rumored to appear soon. The Series I printers are obsolete, but lots of them are still kicking around. They have small (and not expandable) internal memory, which limits what you can do with them. For our purposes the Series III printers are pretty much equivalent to the corresponding Series II printers, except that IIIs have the "resolution enhancement" technology. This makes a noticeable improvement in text quality but (to my eye) doesn't do much for graphics. I have *not* attempted to say anything about HP's non-laser printers (ThinkJet, DeskJet, DeskWriter, etc). Some of the products discussed here also work with those printers, some do not. Also, some of the products discussed here will work (more or less well) with HP-compatible printers made by other manufacturers. I don't know anything about the pitfalls in this area. [Anybody know anything about this?] A LITTLE BACKGROUND: MAC PRINTER DRIVERS The key piece of Mac software for printing is a "printer driver". A printer driver takes drawing commands produced by a Mac application and translates them into commands understood by a printer. The icons you see when you open the Chooser DA correspond to different printer drivers. When you say "Print", the application sends its drawing commands to the printer driver currently selected by the Chooser; the printer driver in turn sends commands to the physical printer. This lets the application be independent of the printer you use (in theory, anyway). Mac applications can produce two kinds of drawing commands: Quickdraw commands and PostScript commands. All printer drivers accept Quickdraw commands, but interpreting PostScript commands requires a large and complex piece of software (the "PostScript interpreter", which is built into PostScript printers). Currently, printer drivers for PostScript printers simply pass PostScript drawing commands straight through to the printer; drivers for non-PostScript printers reject PostScript drawing commands altogether. Hence you cannot print PostScript images on non-PostScript printers. [Some printer drivers containing PostScript interpreters are starting to appear; one is "Freedom of Press" from Custom Applications. These are not real Adobe PostScript, and so probably have compatibility problems. I'd appreciate getting details on how well FoP and the others work.] Apple includes printer drivers for all its printers with the regular Mac system software. The Apple ImageWriter driver is specific to ImageWriters, and the LaserWriter IISC driver is likewise specific to that kind of printer (both of these are non-PostScript printers). The regular LaserWriter driver can be used with any PostScript printer since the PostScript language is standardized. To use a non-Apple printer, you can either make it look like one of the Apple printers at the hardware level (and then use that Apple printer driver), or you can use a non-Apple printer driver that emits the right kind of commands for that printer. Products exist that take each of these approaches. Hardware-level approaches can be further broken down into "PostScript" and "other" (ImageWriter or IISC compatibles). The advantage of PostScript is that you get to use PostScript graphics. PostScript fonts used to be restricted to PS printers, but with the appearance of Adobe Type Manager (ATM), PS fonts can be used with other printers too. VERY IMPORTANT FACT: Many Mac applications do not work very well with non-Apple printer drivers. (HyperCard and many Microsoft applications are particularly blatant offenders.) This is partly Apple's fault; they never published a well-defined standard for printer drivers. Because of this, if you have a compatibility problem between an application and a non-Apple printer driver, it's hard to fix the blame for the problem. In my experience, it's tough to get satisfaction from either the application's manufacturer or the printer driver's manufacturer; you tend to get finger-pointing on both sides. This is a very strong reason for taking the hardware-level adaptation approach; then you use an Apple driver, and you can blame the application if it has trouble printing. It is rumored that Apple is working on a new, better-documented printer driver definition. When that appears (it may or may not make it into System 7.0), compatibility problems should lessen, but not until application *and* printer driver writers revise their code to use the new definition. In the short run the new definition will probably create compatibility problems of its own --- another reason to stick to hardware-level solutions. [If anyone out there knows specifics about the new print architecture, I'd appreciate hearing about possible compatibility problems.] THE PRODUCT LINEUP: These are the products discussed in this document: Software solutions (these are non-Apple printer drivers): * JetLink Express from GDT Softworks * MacPrint from Insight Development Each of these is actually a family of printer drivers, with members for the different LJ models and for other kinds of printers. (A couple of older LJ-compatible drivers are LaserStart and its successor Printworks, both from SoftStyle. These are inferior to the ones reviewed here.) Hardware solutions (these make LJs compatible with Apple printer drivers): * The Grappler series from Orange Micro. The Grappler LS and Grappler LX are for LJs and compatible printers, others are for other kinds of printers. * HP's PostScript cartridge. Works with LJ IId, IIp, and III; presumably with IIId and IIIp too. * Adobe's PostScript cartridge for LJ II (*only*). * Pacific Data's "MacPage" PostScript-clone cartridge. Works with LJ II, IId, IIp, and III. The PostScript cartridges plug right into the printer and will NOT work with anything except the specified type(s) of printer. The other products should work with HP-compatible printers as well as true HPs. Each of these products is discussed in a separate section below; then there's a summary at the end. I've tried to quote both list price and "street price", the latter being typical price from reputable mail-order houses like MacConnection. If you are at a university you can probably buy HP products at academic discount, which is somewhat lower than street price. I don't know if any of the other vendors offer academic discounts. JETLINK EXPRESS: JetLink Express (JLE) lists at $149 from GDT Softworks, (604) 291-9121; street price about $90. A Mac-to-LJ cable is included. JLE works by creating a bitmap image of the page to be printed, then dumping that into the printer. The trouble with this is that a full page at 300dpi is about 1 Megabyte of data, which takes a while to shove over a serial line. (You definitely want to be running the printer at its maximum 19200bps, not at 9600 which is all that some PCs can manage --- this may be a problem if you intend to switch the printer between PC and Mac.) GDT has put a lot of work into doing this as fast as possible; typical print times are two to four minutes per page, less if the page is only partly covered. If you are in a hurry you can work at 150 or even 75 dpi, which reduces the data volume and print time by a factor of 4 or 16, with a loss in print quality. (By now they may have an LJ III-specific driver that understands the III's graphic data compression options; that would speed things up too.) Aside from the speed problem, you need enough memory in the printer to hold the bitmap image (LJs have to store the entire page until it's printed, unlike some other printers such as DeskJets). This is not too much of a problem with the newer LJs, which come with 1Mb of memory standard. It is a problem with LJ Pluses, which have only 1/2 Mb and are not upgradable; but it turns out that JLE is pretty smart about not dumping white space, and this saves printer memory as well as time. I found that most 300dpi letter size pages would print on a Plus, although some rearrangement of the page was sometimes necessary to put the white space where JLE could take advantage of it. For densely printed or legal-size pages you may be forced to back off to 150dpi to avoid LJ Plus memory overflow. An original LJ has even less memory and is probably close to unusable with JLE. Text is imaged from Macintosh screen fonts, which means you get the jaggies unless you have large font sizes installed (4x the screen size for 300dpi). GDT has alleviated this problem by implementing scalable fonts inside their driver. JLE comes with scalable Times, Helvetica, Courier, and Symbol lookalike fonts, and you can buy more (basically the LaserWriter Plus font set) for $200. HOWEVER, there are bugs in their font handling. I found quite a lot of cases where what you saw on the screen was not what you got printed out, at least with the applications I was using (principally ReadySetGo). For example, "condensed" or "extended" text would be properly spaced only if it wasn't also bold or italic. I would recommend ignoring GDT's scalable fonts, and instead investing in Adobe Type Manager and PostScript fonts. This is slower than GDT's code but has fewer bugs and gives you access to a vastly larger font library. You can squeeze out some additional speed by buying a serial-to-parallel converter box (about $90 from GDT). This is a win because LJs can accept graphics data through their parallel ports faster than through their serial ports. JLE can drive the Mac's serial port at speeds above 19200bps when it is mated to the converter. GDT claims this setup is 25% to 50% faster; I have not tried it. (Using parallel rather than serial can also simplify sharing the printer with a PC; just add a parallel A/B switch box. HP recommends against mechanical switch boxes, but electronic ones are safe.) I have not found any print spoolers that work with JLE. (SuperLaserSpool's latest version is claimed to, by GDT, but does NOT work in my experience.) My really big gripe is that GDT does not fix reported bugs, even when you tell them exactly what the problem is and where (I spent some time disassembling their driver for my own amusement). After waiting 6 months and paying for an upgrade I would sure as hell expect to get a fix... MACPRINT: MacPrint (MP) lists at $149 from Insight Development, (415) 652-4115; street price about $95. A Mac-to-LJ cable is included. [I have not used MacPrint personally; corrections to this section would be appreciated.] MP takes a different approach to printing text: instead of imaging characters as bitmaps, it sends the raw text to the printer to be printed in one of the printer's fonts (either built-in or installed in a plug-in font cartridge). This is a lot faster than JLE's bitmaps, because MP only needs to send 1 byte per character, but it has its own drawbacks; primarily, you get funny spacing unless the Mac is using a screen font that exactly matches the printer font size-wise. MP comes with some screen fonts that match some standard HP printer fonts. [I don't know if MP supports the III's scalable printer fonts yet.] MP uses bitmap printing for Mac fonts that don't correspond to HP fonts, and for graphics images. Actually JLE can do this too; they call it "draft mode", and don't support any bitmap printing in that mode. The difference between the two products is that JLE is optimized to do bitmaps well, whereas MP concentrates on doing HP-font text well. JLE is considerably faster than MP at bitmap printing. If you want fast text printing and are willing to use only printer fonts, MP is the right choice; if you do lots of graphics or want to use non-HP fonts, JLE is the way to go. You can use ATM with MP, but MP probably cannot print the resulting character bitmaps as fast as JLE. So if you want to use PostScript fonts, JLE is probably the better choice. HP is recommending MP over JLE, so it may have fewer compatibility problems than JLE. (HP thinks enough of MP to resell it in their catalog; this is not something they do lightly.) [I'd appreciate reports of compatibility problems, or lack of same, for MP. I have heard that MacWrite 4.5 bombs out with the DeskJet version of MP.] GRAPPLER: The Grappler LX is the current product for LaserJets; earlier versions for LJs included the Grappler LS and LQ. [Is the LS still available?] List price for the LX is $199 from Orange Micro, (800) 223-8029; street price about $130. Grappler is an external box that converts Apple ImageWriter print data into LJ commands. (There are versions for other popular printer types too.) It uses the Apple "ImageWriter LQ" printer driver, but modifies the driver slightly so that it uses the correct page size and resolution for the printer. (For example, with an LJ a 300dpi image needs to be produced, not the 216dpi used by the ImageWriter LQ. Apparently the driver is written in such a way that this change is easy to make.) The data being sent to the printer is bitmaps, so speed leaves something to be desired, and you need adequate memory in the printer (Orange Micro recommends 1Mb minimum). See previous JLE discussion. The Grappler is probably not as smart as JLE about optimizing away white space, so it probably won't cope as well as JLE does with 1/2 Mb LJ Pluses. Like JLE, Grappler depends on the Mac to supply fonts; you need large size fonts to get high resolution text. Orange Micro provides large-size Times, Helvetica, and Courier lookalike fonts. As with JLE, purchasing ATM and PostScript fonts is probably the best solution if you want publication quality output. [I have not used a Grappler personally. More info would be appreciated. What's the difference between LX, LS, LQ Grapplers? What is performance like? Are there any application compatibility problems?] GENERAL COMMENTS ABOUT POSTSCRIPT CARTRIDGES: PostScript (PS) cartridges are available for Series II and III LJs; the Series I printers are not sufficiently expandable to support a PS cart. The Apple LaserWriter driver expects to talk to PS printers over an AppleTalk network. The "network" can be just a single cable between your Mac and the printer, but the printer has to use the AppleTalk protocol. In the case of the HP PS cartridge, this means you need to buy an AppleTalk interface board for the printer. [It's not clear to me how the Pacific Data and Adobe PS carts handle this ... do they include an AppleTalk interface??] If you happen to have multiple Macs, an AppleTalk network is a cheap and easy way to share the printer; even if you have only one Mac, AppleTalk is faster and more error-proof than RS232 protocol. Actually there is a version of the LaserWriter driver that will work over a plain RS232 connection, but it is not free (you must buy it from APDA) and it is very out of date (only version 4.0). This is probably not a desirable solution. [Does anybody know if the current LW driver can readily be tweaked to speak RS232?] For all the PS cartridges, you must buy extra internal memory for the printer, as the standard amount of memory is not enough. For HP's and Pacific Data's cartridges you need 2 Megabytes add-on memory; to do double-sided printing in a IId you need 4Mb add-on (HP's cart only, PD's won't do this at all). Adobe says 1.5Mb add-on is sufficient for their cart. [Actually the HP cart will function with just 1Mb add-on, but I've heard reports of trouble printing complex pages with the minimum. HP recommends 2Mb add-on and I'd say to follow their recommendation.] Don't buy the extra memory from HP; they charge about three times what it is worth. Several third-party vendors make a comfortable living selling HP-compatible memory boards at more realistic prices. I bought mine from South Coast Electronics ((213) 208-3260) for $270 for a 2Mb board (with sockets for 2 more Mb). Pacific Data Products has a good reputation for their HP memory boards. [Reports about other memory vendors would be appreciated.] HP'S POSTSCRIPT CARTRIDGE: HP Part Number 33439P, lists at $695; street price about $550. This contains a genuine Adobe PostScript interpreter, version 52.2 (very recent). The HP PS cartridge is a solid, user-friendly implementation. For example, you can enable or disable the power-up test page from the front panel, instead of having to send an arcane bit of PostScript. You'll also need an AppleTalk Interface Kit, HP part # 33416A; I don't have list price, but street price is about $220. You have to buy a cable as well, HP doesn't include it. You do NOT need one of the expensive AppleTalk cables if you are just connecting the printer to a single nearby Mac. An ImageWriter II cable does the job for under $10. You also need extra memory, as noted above. 2Mb is recommended; you might need more if you use *lots* of downloaded PostScript fonts. (I've had no trouble printing font sample documents with a dozen or more downloaded fonts, so I think that 2Mb will satisfy all normal needs.) All told you will spend about $1000 over the price of the bare printer. This combo gives you the functional equivalent of a LaserWriter IINT, although benchmarks recently reported in MacUser (Oct. 90 issue) make it look a bit slower than a IINT. I detect considerable anti-HP bias in the text of the MacUser review [in particular, their statements about LJ III print quality are way out of line with my experience], but I don't think they fudged the timing numbers. With the AppleTalk card HP will give you a customized version of the Apple LaserWriter printer driver; however, you can use the regular Apple driver if you want to. The customized driver is mainly useful for getting at specialized features, such as double-sided printing on the IId or changing resolution enhancement settings on a III. With a IIp you might as well use the Apple driver. (I've found one application, DesignStudio, that will not work with the HP driver; but it prints OK with the Apple driver. SuperLaserSpool seems to have problems with the HP driver too.) One shortcoming of the HP cart is that to switch between PostScript and native HP mode, you have to power down the printer and insert or remove the PS cart. This is very easy, but since you have to wait through the power-up selftest, the elapsed time to swap is a couple of minutes. This is not a big problem unless you want to share the printer with a PC on a daily basis. Also note that any HP-type fonts built into the printer are totally ignored by the PS cartridge; conversely, you can't use PS fonts in HP mode. ADOBE'S POSTSCRIPT CARTRIDGE: [This works only in an original Series II LJ. I don't have any price or other details about it, but I imagine it is very similar to HP's cartridge for the newer LJs. Reports from users would be appreciated. In particular, does it use AppleTalk? If not, what?] PACIFIC DATA'S "MACPAGE" POSTSCRIPT-CLONE CARTRIDGE: The MacPage cartridge is from Pacific Data Products, (619) 552-0880; I don't have list price, but street price is about $450. It works in LJ II, IIp, IId, or III printers. (NB: the IId's double sided printing capability is NOT currently supported.) You need 2Mbytes add-on memory; see above for recommendations. I don't know how they deal with the AppleTalk problem. The cart does not use an Adobe PostScript interpreter, but a clone from Phoenix Technologies. I have not personally used the Pacific Data cart, but I have seen numerous complaints about it on the net; it is apparently slow, buggy, and not very compatible with real Adobe PostScript. It is also reported that the manufacturer is not responsive to complaints, and that their tech support people are unfamiliar with Macintoshes. A typical complaint is: > If it runs out of paper during a print job, adding more paper doesn't > continue the job --- you have to reset the printer. (Bad news, folks. > Sending an end-of-job (^D) down the line doesn't help, and Pacific Data > isn't interested in problems like this.) I have some more on file if you need further dissuasion... One advantage of the PD cart over HP's is that you can switch between PS and native HP mode with a software command. The printer does a powerup selftest cycle in response, so switching isn't much faster than with HP's, but at least you can do it without manual intervention. Unless the software switch feature is absolutely essential to you, the HP cartridge is the superior choice for LJ IId, IIp, and III. The Adobe cart is probably the better choice if you have an original LJ II, but I don't have any direct reports on it. SUMMARY: If you have an original LaserJet (not Plus), MacPrint is probably your only choice; you don't have enough printer memory to run JLE or Grappler, except in draft mode which is not their strong point. Personally I'd say to recycle the printer as a boat anchor and buy a IIp. If you have an LJ Plus or Plus 500, Grappler is probably unusable [has anyone tried it?]; JLE is workable but can be aggravating, as small changes to a page can make it overflow printer memory. MacPrint seems to be the market leader these days, possibly because it handles Series I printers the best. If you don't want to use the printer's fonts, you should go with JLE anyway. For any Series II or III, I think you should go the PostScript route if at all feasible. The up front expense will be more than repaid in reduced aggravation and added graphics capability. If you can't afford the price of admission, I'd recommend buying JLE [or possibly Grappler?] and ATM. That way you can at least be using PostScript fonts, and when you finally scrape up the cash for a PostScript upgrade you will still be able to use your font library. These remarks are all based on my own experiences, which are mainly desktop publishing chores. No-hassle operation and fussy text appearance requirements were my big criteria. If you are mainly interested in fast text output and are not picky about your fonts, you may well find that MacPrint is the best choice. The situation is likely to change considerably when System 7.0 is released, both due to the new print architecture and due to the availability of TrueType scalable fonts. [If anyone in the know is willing to say anything about the best bets for surviving System 7, please do!] Before committing to any non-PostScript solution, I'd recommend thorough tests with the application programs you plan to use. If that's not possible, try posting a specific query about the combinations you're interested in. [I'd appreciate such data for inclusion in this message.] A PLEA FOR MORE DATA: Please e-mail comments, corrections, confirmations, etc to the address below. I'd appreciate not getting flamed too severely for any errors... -- tom lane Internet: tgl@cs.cmu.edu UUCP: <your favorite internet/arpanet gateway>!cs.cmu.edu!tgl BITNET: tgl%cs.cmu.edu@cmuccvma CompuServe: >internet:tgl@cs.cmu.edu