jms20@po.CWRU.Edu (John M. Sully) (06/22/91)
I'm not sure if this is the appropriate forum, but here's my question: I saw an ad for a font package called "Publisher's PowerPak" (or something very close -- I don't have the catalog with me) in a Tiger Software catalog. It claims to work from within WordPerfect, Word, and a few more word processors and work with dot matrix printers. I can't find it in any stores so I haven't been able to see a demonstration. If anyone has heard of/used this program, I'd be interested to hear if it's any good. According to the ad, it received an Info World award in 1991. Please reply via e-mail. Thanks! -- | John M. Sully | "Why do I get the idea that | | Case Western Reserve University | someday I'll be describing | | jms20@po.cwru.edu -or- | this to a psychologist?" | | sully@opus.iarc.mco.edu | --Lisa Simpson |
richw@hplsla.HP.COM (Rich Wilson) (06/27/91)
I purchased Publishers Powerpack from Atech software directly, responding to a mail solicitation. It works well, with a few gotchas for me. These may not be a problem in your situation. 1. When driving an MX100 with graphtrax (and probably also MX80 and maybe some other printers made by Epson), a design problem in the printer combined with the timing of the printer driver causes the printout to be fuzzy on some lines. Try slowing down your processor if you have this problem. 2. When printing from wordperfect, the printer driver grabs the processor, and you can't edit while printing in the background like you can for normal printer drivers. 3. The printer driver for the Epson is really dumb, needlessly moving the print head over empty space printing nothing. 4. The output at 300dpi is very good. At the lower resolution of my Epson, the letters are a little jiggled here and there. (The letter-to-letter spacing is a little uneven) In landscape mode, the letters are jiggled up and down. 5. Although the printer driver can handle setups for three printers, you can't tell it which printer to use when you're printing to a file. It just uses the first printer. So, you have to go to the printer setup (separate program) and re-define the first printer. In order to fix items 1-3, I wrote a dumb print spooler to run under Desqview. By printing to a fixed file from wordperfect, the spooler finds this file, converts it using the Atech utility, and then prints it, converting null graphics at the beginning of a line to spaces, and deleting null graphics at the end of a line. =========================================================================== Rich Wilson Internet: richw@hplsla.lsid.HP.COM Hewlett Packard Company Phone: 206-335-2245 Lake Stevens Instrument Division FAX: 206-335-2828