jmunkki@hila.hut.fi (Juri Munkki) (05/02/91)
I have a StyleWriter on my desk at the office and it's a really nice printer. The problem is that the driver seems to be extremely stupid. It looks like it is rendering extremely narrow stripes at a time and that way reduces the speed potential of this printer. Rendering speed on a Mac IIsi with 5 MB of RAM should not be the limiting factor for printing. I tried a MacDraw document in two ways. The first time I gave a lot of memory for MacDraw itself. The second time I left a lot of free MultiFinder memory. Both were slow. This leads me to believe that the driver is not intelligent enough to increase the rendering stripe if there is enough memory available. A one inch high, 10 inches wide stripe only takes about 160KB at 360 dpi. I would be willing to sacrifice up to two megabytes of memory to get the printing speed up. I imagine most people have about 512KB of free MF memory, so the driver could easily render one quarter page at a time. Since you can't start up new applications while the printer is printing, there's no reason not to reserve all the available memory. I don't know if the driver uses double buffering, but that would be another way to speed up things. While one buffer is being sent to the printer, the other one could be rendered. The printer itself is absolutely wonderful. It prints even on yellow pad notes! ____________________________________________________________________________ / Juri Munkki / Helsinki University of Technology / Wind / Project / / jmunkki@hut.fi / Computing Center Macintosh Support / Surf / STORM / ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~