Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:37259 sci.space:13468 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!ames!sun-barr!newstop!sun!lorelei!lemay From: lemay@lorelei.Sun.COM (Laura Lemay) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,sci.space Subject: Printing On a LaserWriter -- hints Message-ID: <123914@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 29 Aug 89 18:26:55 GMT References: <20982.24F8D5E1@cmhgate.FIDONET.ORG> <697@anagld.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Reply-To: lemay@sun.UUCP (Laura Lemay) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 99 A bunch of people seem to be asking stuff about printing to the laserwriter, so here's a big posting to cover all the questions: 1. When I made up transparencies on my mac, they looked fine. When I brought them into the mac shop to be printed on the LW, they came out all wrong. Whats going on here? Although the Mac advertises as WYSIWYG, it is not necessarily so. Fonts that are displayed on the screen are not the same size/shape etc as the postscript fonts that appear printed on the LW. So the laserwriter reformats everything as best it can with the font it is told to use. (All right, LW hackers, thats not a scientific explanation, but it'll do.) The easy solution I've discovered for this is to pop a laserwriter driver into your system folder. If you are pressed for space, you don't need the laser prep, just the driver. Then, before you start working with any formatting, select the chooser from the apple menu (oh, you also need to install this DA if you don`t have it.) It'll ask you a whole bunch of stuff about appletalk and the laserwriter. NOTE: you do NOT need appletalk or a laserwriter or even a printer at all to do this. The goal is to make the mac THINK that its printing to a laserwriter. Then, the mac will try to use laserwriter spacing, etc and things should come out properly. 2. I've noticed the laserwriter doesn't print along the outer 1/4" of the page. Is there any way to change that? Nope. Sorry. Since the LW is such a small printer, it needs that space around the edges of the paper to pull the paper through. Its very irking, but its a fact of life. 3. How do I keep a startup page from printing when I turn on the laserwriter? This has been beaten to death on this bboard for a while now, but basically tehre are two ways to do it: 1. (If you're not a postscript hacker). Pull out the paper tray an inch or so when the LW starts up, until the orange light goes on steadily. 2. (If you are a postscript hacker). Damn. I thought I rememebred this one. Basically it involves getting into interactive mode with the laserwriter (or sending a script to the LW interactively), and changing a variable called "setdostartpage." Sigh. Is tehre someone out there who could write the actual script to be downloaded to the LW and post it? 3. I just did a paper using the "london" font, which I really like. But when I printed it on the LW, it said "Font London not found, using bitmap." London is right there on my system, why can't it find it? This was the most commonly asked question when I was managing a macintosh center in college. So here's my treatise on the subject: There are two types of fonts: screen fonts and printer fonts. The screen fonts are the ones you (obviously) see on your screen, and also the ones you install in your system file using font/da mover. These are called bitmap fonts, becasue they are made up of single dots (bits) on your screen. When you print on an imagewriter (this may have changed, I don't know how the new imagewriters work), these bits are downloaded directly to the paper. If a dot is black on the screen, it is printed on the page. So you can always print any font you want on an imagewriter. However, the laserwriter is infinitely different. The laserwriter contains a whole differetn set of fonts, called postscript outline fonts. These are mathematical descriptions on fonts, rather than bits. What fonts exist in your laserwriter depends on the particular laserwriter. None of them will have London. What your macintosh application does when it prints is send the NAME of the fonts down to the printer, and the printer calls up that piece of code for the font to print everything. If there isn't a match between the name the app sends it and the list of internal fonts, the LW will do one of two things -- it will substitute another font it knows (courier for monaco, times for new york, etc), or it will bitmap the screen font onto the page. When the laserwriter makes bitmaps, they will usually come out looking ragged and strange. This is because of the differences in resolution between the screen and the page. On the screen, there are 72 dots per inch (dpi). The laserwriter prints at 300 dpi. Some other printers can print at even higher resolutions (400, 1200, etc.). In any case, the size of a dot on the screen is a lot bigger than the size of a dot on the page. This is why fonts look ragged on the printer. There is a "font smoothing" option in many applications; sometimes this makes the fonts look better when printed, but often doesn't work very well at all. Your best bet is to stick to fonts that the laserwriter has in memory. On interesting quirk of having fonts in the laserwriter is that these mathematical formulas for fonts can be scaled to any size. You may only have four sizes of a particular font installed in you system, but you can print any size you want on the LW. Depending on the program you use, larger or wierd size fonts will either not be available or will come out looking really wierd on the screen. But they will look fine when printed. whew. Hope this has helped..... -Laura Lemay lemay%lorelei@sun.com Redhead. Drummer. Geek.