jonabbey@cs.utexas.edu (Jonathan David Abbey) (06/14/91)
Hello! I recently had the occassion to do some work with ProWrite, only to find that the text printing in graphics on a dot-matrix printer is abysmal. Now, I know the reason for this; the Amiga's screen does not have the same aspect ratio as the printer, nor does it have a dots-per-inch value which is a multiple of that of the printer. This does not assuage my anguish, however, at knowing that the best Amiga word-processing software can't produce results comparable to that done on a Macintosh with 6 year old software. What I want to know is this: Is there any reason why the Amiga's concept of a printer driver couldn't be extended to be aware of fonts and text output as seperate from bitmap-dumping? There is certainly no reason why this feature couldn't be added at some point, even if old programs don't automatically use the feature. I am also aware that Commodore is working on a scalable font technology, but I am not sure that this will address the problems that occur with low-cost dot matrix printers. It would seem to me that it should be possible to take, say, a ProWrite file, examine it to get the text and font information, then print with the screen fonts mapped pixel-to-pixel to the printer, with creative inter-character spacing to take care of the critical page width problem. Having non-integer scaling is just too horrendous for words.. a given character may look different depending on where it is on the page, and the thickness of the strokes varies across the character.. <whimper> -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonathan David Abbey \ "Dudez! Gimme a quarter!" - Aldo Cella the university of texas at austin \ - Dedicated to the Cygnian in all of us. computer science/math?/psychology? \ jonabbey@cs.utexas.edu
waggoner@omefs3 (Mark Waggoner) (06/14/91)
In article <96@frio.cs.utexas.edu> jonabbey@cs.utexas.edu (Jonathan David Abbey) writes: >Hello! I recently had the occassion to do some work with ProWrite, only to >find that the text printing in graphics on a dot-matrix printer is abysmal. > >Now, I know the reason for this; the Amiga's screen does not have the same >aspect ratio as the printer, nor does it have a dots-per-inch value which is >a multiple of that of the printer. This does not assuage my anguish, however, >at knowing that the best Amiga word-processing software can't produce results >comparable to that done on a Macintosh with 6 year old software. Description of suggested solution deleted... You can do almost what you want; If you go in to the page setup requester (I think) of Prowrite and turn the "Aspect Adjusted" option off, the fonts will be scaled the same on the X and Y axis, eliminating some of the poor looking characteristics of the graphical fonts. It does mean that margins get adjusted differently for different printers, so don't try to set up a nice looking document on a dot-matrix printer with, for example, 180x180 resolution and then try to take it to a 300x300 laser printer. When you change the printer in preferences, the margins will all change in Prowrite! The fonts are still less than ideal, and smoothing only helps a little. IMHO, Prowrite ought to just DUMP all the graphical support and provide a little more powerful environment for straight text. I suppose it works just fine if you output postscript, but the bitmap font text printing isn't worth much. -- -- Mark Waggoner waggoner@ichips.intel.com (503) 642-8557 No, I don't speak for intel.
chrisl@cbmvax.commodore.com (Christian Ludwig - CATS) (06/14/91)
In article <96@frio.cs.utexas.edu> jonabbey@cs.utexas.edu (Jonathan David Abbey) writes: >Hello! I recently had the occassion to do some work with ProWrite, only to >find that the text printing in graphics on a dot-matrix printer is abysmal. > >Now, I know the reason for this; the Amiga's screen does not have the same >aspect ratio as the printer, nor does it have a dots-per-inch value which is >a multiple of that of the printer. This does not assuage my anguish, however, >at knowing that the best Amiga word-processing software can't produce results >comparable to that done on a Macintosh with 6 year old software. > [stuff deleted...] >spacing to take care of the critical page width problem. Having non-integer >scaling is just too horrendous for words.. a given character may look different >depending on where it is on the page, and the thickness of the strokes varies >across the character.. > ><whimper> > IF you're using the latest version of ProW*ite, the Preferences "Scaling- Integer vs. Fractional" doesn't affect output. The software seems to override this setting. HOWEVER - You can get quite good output by turning off the Aspect Adjusted feature (in Project->Page Setup...) While this is definitely NOT an ideal solution (characters aspect will be all wrong if your printer's dpi isn't "right") it does dramatically improve the overall quality of the output on dot matrix printers from ProW*ite. Hope this proves at least marginally useful. > >-- >------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Jonathan David Abbey \ "Dudez! Gimme a quarter!" - Aldo Cella >the university of texas at austin \ - Dedicated to the Cygnian in all of us. >computer science/math?/psychology? \ jonabbey@cs.utexas.edu /// /// The opinions expressed may not reflect the official position of my employer. \\\/// (Of course that depends on which position they're in!) \XX/
hcmutt@hpcupt3.cup.hp.com (Harry Muttart) (06/15/91)
New versions of ProWrite "know" how to use built-in printer fonts, which are generally superior to bit-mapped fonts. ProWrite also has an add-on product called "ProScript" (or something like it), which will convert output to Postscript, which will produce nice resolution. Also, to get the most out of the printer driver, you often need to experiment. The typical defaults favor speed at the expense of reasonable results. From preferences, try selecting the higher resolutions for your printer and integer scaling. This alone can make a dramatic improvement (the same letter looks the same everywhere). I've also experimented with the smoothing option, which produces very stylish results with the garnet font at 150 and 300 dpi (on a Deskjet). I do not have a lot to say about extending the printer drivers, though.