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From: erik@hpsad.HP.COM (Erik Kilk)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Info about HP DeskWriter requested
Message-ID: <10090001@hpsad.HP.COM>
Date: 8 Nov 89 23:29:11 GMT
References: <782@idacom.UUCP>
Organization: HP Signal Analysis Division - Rohnert Park, CA
Lines: 52


I recently purchased a DeskWriter and will be happy to try to be an
objective evaluator to anyone who mails me.  Although I work for HP, I
work 100s (1000s?) of miles away from the printer guys.

In the past I've tried third party HP laser printer drivers, not all of
them, but a couple, and was always frustrated at their limitations and
gave up on plans to buy a laser printer.

I'm real happy with the DeskWriter, in fact, so much so that I have
that "how did I live without it" feeling.

When I tried third party laser printer drivers, I had troubles if the
laser printer didn't have enough memory to image an entire 300 dpi page.
This means you can't do much graphics at all and forces you to use the
internal HP fonts.  Once you use the internal fonts you loose WYSIWYG.

With the DeskWriter I've been getting perfect, absolutely perfect
WYSIWYG output.  You don't have the memory problems because the printer
doesn't need to image the entire page before starting to print.

The scalable fonts are great.  I no longer have to worry about which
fonts I have loaded in my System file.  I can just pick any size and it
comes out perfect.  (I even tried pt 2 and could read it.)  Now I can't
wait until my screen can do this.  The DeskWriter software comes with
scalable Times, Helvetica, Courier, and Symbol -- all I care about.  But
you can also use any of the Mac fonts -- I use some Cairo characters.
Since I have a Cairo 36 in my System file, I can print Cairo 9 just
great.  Odd unscalable font sizes aren't any worse, and are often
better, than the ImageWriter.

Speed was a problem with the laser printers.  Mostly because sending
a full page of 300 dpi dots took a very long time -- several minutes.
The DeskWriter, I assume, uses data compression techniques.  When printing
my Thesis, which is double spaced, the DeskWriter is printing the pages
faster than I can read them.  (Much better than even my old ImageWriter.) 

I tried screen dumping.  I was able to do it by dumping to a file first
(CNTL-SHIFT-3 I believe),  and then using SuperPaint to print it.  The
direct print dump (CNTL-SHIFT-4 I believe) didn't work.

I was impressed when I was able to print SuperPaint's laser bit images 
(those are the ones where you can edit dots at 300 dpi) and get hairline
width drawings on the DeskWriter.

Erik Kilk


P.S.  If you have any direct questions, please mail to me.  I seem to
be having a hard time mailing out unless I can use the r (respond) command
to someone who has reached me first.  (I'm too lazy to figure out all
the mail addresses correctly.)