brown@ftms.UUCP (Vidiot) (04/04/91)
FLAME ON, get out your flame retardent suits...
Yesterday we received our IPCs and the SPARCprinter/NeWSprint. Today I put
through the cover page for my Star Trek: The Next Generation program guide.
The cover page has become, for me anyway, an excellent way to test laser
printers, as there are plenty of arcs, screen fills and lines drawn. If any
of you have ever printed my guide will understand.
Anyway, I am not pleased with the quality of the output from the NeWSprint
PostScript. Let me explain.
The PostScript has the following lines in it:
% Set DOTSIZE to the value wanted for the dot pitch:
% The first number is for the Linotronic, the second for 300 dpi LaserWriter
linotronic {/DOTSIZE 90.71428571 def} {/DOTSIZE 75.0 def} ifelse
[following is later on in the program]
currentscreen /spot exch def pop pop DOTSIZE 35 {spot} setscreen
With the Qume PS-810 or the Apple LaserWriter IINT, I get a nice gray screen
with well defined dots in the screen. With NeWSprint, I get crap, i.e.,
an aliased pattern repeated for the screen. It looks like someone dropped
a plaid pattern on the page for the screen. It really looks sick.
If I remove the lines that set the screen, I get a screen that isn't anywhere
near the shade of gray that I wanted and the dots look like malformed
triangles. Not one of the splotches on the paper looks like a dot.
I next put the lines back in and changed from the 35 degree angle to the 45
degree angle. I got the finer pitch that I was after, still the wrong shade
of gray though. But, at about every 16 points (horizontally) there are
vertical lines cutting though the screen. It is white in nature.
Needless to say, the NeWSprint screen producing software sucks. But, that
isn't the end of this tail. There are large characters on the page that
are drawn with PostScript arc procedures. At 300 dpi, the Qume and Apple
printers draw relatively smooth curves. NeWSprint on the other hand draws
line segments for these curves and boy, do they stand out.
Last but not least, a few of the line segments are not being joined properly.
Each of the straight-line corners should have a point. Some of them have
a notch cut out of them, as if the closepath didn't properly end the line
segment correctly.
BTW, I have printed out some gray-scale wheels from the program scrntst.ps.
This program is from a two-PostScript set that discusses screens, etc.
Needless to say, the output from these wheels really looks like crap. The
same wheels on the Qume or LaserWriter are really good.
As a customer of the software, I think the package is below par. I can get
better results for the older technology that I can from the new. The software
needs to be rewritten so that it does what a PostScript laser printer, like
the two I mentioned, does. The output from NeWSprint is really poor.
Hell, NeWSprint doesn't even like the output from the psnup program, which has
no problems on the aforementioned printers.
Oh, to top it off, a 100% compatible replacement for enscript is not to be
found. I want my `enscript -2rG' to work.
Is Sun going to do something about this and are they going to give it to
those of us that currently have NeWSprint for free (hah!)? What we have now
is more like an alpha release than a product. Does someone at Sun want to
reply to my dislikes?
FLAME OFF
As a fast way to print DRAFT PostScript documents, it is tough to beat. But...
The two PostScript files are available upon request, if you wish to see
for yourself.
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