Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!tut!santra!santra!s29749s From: s29749s@saha.hut.fi (Olli Johannes Arnberg) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: Deskjet printers Message-ID: Date: 29 May 90 20:01:18 GMT References: <1990May22.221510.25732@csuchico.edu> Sender: news@santra.uucp (Cnews - USENET news system) Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland Lines: 90 In-Reply-To: lorner@csuchico.edu's message of 22 May 90 22:15:10 GMT In article <1990May22.221510.25732@csuchico.edu> lorner@csuchico.edu (Lance Orner) writes: >I've also been using the printer driver that I've seen on the archives around >the Internet, and it has been working great as an Imagewriter-like >printer, but I've been tinkering with the 300 dpi of the printer, and >haven't had much luck. > > The driver uses larger (32+ point) fonts and scales them down to a smaller >size for better resolution. Unfortunately I don't have that many large font >sizes for it to scale down, so I've been looking for alternatives. Yes. The HPDJ driver needs really large font sizes for adequate 300 dpi output. Here is a table of suitable font sizes: Your text 75dpi 100dpi 150dpi 300dpi 9 pt 9 pt 12 pt 18 pt 36 pt 12 pt 12 pt 16 pt 24 pt 48 pt 14 pt 14 pt 19 pt 28 pt 56 pt 18 pt 18 pt 24 pt 36 pt 72 pt 24 pt 24 pt 32 pt 48 pt 96 pt 36 pt 36 pt 48 pt 72 pt n/a One way to get fonts is to find a LaserWriter IISC. It comes with a good set of large fonts, namely Times, Helvetica, Courier, and Symbol. These fonts are very good at wasting hard disk space, for instance Times96 is about 148kB. > 'Freedom of Press' looks good -- it will convert a Postscript page to 300 >dpi so that it comes out nicely, but that is one more step that I have to >go through for each printed document, something I'd like to avoid if possible. We have no experience with that. It is clear that it won't be especially fast -- when you combine the PostScript interpretation time and the DeskJet graphics printing time at 300 dpi, the result will probably lie somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes per page. Of course this is the one and only way to get nice PostScript effects. >I thought that Adobe Type Manager might do the trick, but I read somewhere >that it would not do this sort of thing for one reason or another. Anybody >care to comment on this? We use ATM daily and it works without any problems with HPDJ. We ordered it from MacConnection and for $59 it was almost a bargain. In addition to providing nice-looking large point sizes and true italics&bolds on screen, it is capable of generating bitmaps for the HPDJ at point sizes of at least 2000 (!) points. This means that you can use all the point sizes your applications allow and have them printed beautifully using HPDJ. Although Adobe clearly has two unpleasant goals while they make the ATM available, it is very recommendable. (The goals? Well, to establish PostScript Type 1 (encrypted) fonts as _the_ font standard in the Macintosh environment before Apple manages to publish its Royal outline fonts and to increase the sales of Adobe's fonts (which are really expensive!). Luckily many other companies offer Type 1 fonts (which ATM requires) at lower prices -- this is because Adobe recently went public with their Type 1 specification.) >Or will System 7 solve my problems? I hear that it will have more support >for non-postscript printers, but other than that, I don't know what it >can do. It depends. System 7 is expected to include a totally revised printing architecture which will break all the existing drivers, including HPDJ. On the other hand, this new architecture should be cleanly designed (unlike the current horrendous mess). Apple has even promised to provide "developer kits" that will allow printer drivers to be written for third-party printers with relative ease. There is only one minor drawback: the price of this kit is yet unannounced (=we won't be able to buy it). Of course Hewlett-Packard can afford this kit. They will surely buy it to revise their newer DeskWriter driver. Because their marketing department will quickly calculate that they won't be able to set the price for a Deskjet driver so high that it will cover the price difference between a Deskjet and a DeskWriter, HP won't necessarily bother to do anything for Deskjet. Perhaps an independent printer driver vendor will make a version for the Deskjet. >What have people done to get good resolution out of their non-Postscript >printers? I've been doing a lot of reading, but haven't gotten any solid >answers yet. I'd love to hear from some people. > ----Lance M. Orner So, we use our HPDJ driver with ATM and we are quite happy with it. Sometimes we hope that HP would have used something more powerful than a Z80 as the CPU of this magnificent printer. Regards, Ari Mujunen (s29851c@taltta.hut.fi), Olli Arnberg (s29749s@saha.hut.fi)