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From: huebner@aero.aero.org (Robert E. Huebner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: EpsonQ on Amiga and A-Max
Keywords: Epson compatible, Panasonic, PenPal, A-Max
Message-ID: <93806@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
Date: 7 Dec 90 23:32:49 GMT
References: <2630@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>
Sender: news@aerospace.aero.org
Reply-To: huebner@aero.aero.org (Robert E. Huebner)
Organization: The Aerospace Corporation
Lines: 74

In article <2630@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>, khl@doc.ic.ac.uk (Kang Ho Lee) writes:
|> Hi,
|>    I have recently purchased a Panasoinc 1124, which is compatible
with Epson
|> LQ2500 according to the manual. First of all, let me say I am fairly
satisfied
|> with its output. My first disappointment came when I tried to use it
in A-Max,
|> the ImageWriter emulation provided by Readysoft is next to useless with its
|> weird aspect ratio. Before I had a printer, I used to bring all my work back
|> to my Mac at college to print, now that I have one, I would like to know if
|> anyone actually using one of the third party Epson drivers on thier A-Max. I
|> remembered there was a mention of drivers by a company called GDT Softworks
|> Inc. in the A-max manual, anyone using/tried that?

I tried using a third-party (not sure if it was commercial, because I
decided not to use it) Epson Driver.  Specifically it was an "RX" driver.
It was painfully slow.  Also, it did not allow nearly the number of 
options the normal ImageWriter driver does.  Perhaps their are better
ones around (I should hope so) but if you see an Epson RX driver for
sale, beware.  It does not suffice.  I downloaded this driver from a 
local Mac BBS.  It was not a pirate BBS, but with things like printer
drivers, Mac users seem to "blind" themselve to the piracy issue.  Sorta
like with DA's - even the most honest Mac users I know don't think twice
about using a screen blanker some company is asking $50 for.  Thank god
for the Fred Fish collection.  The driver made no mention of GDT Softworks.

I was shocked that this printing problem wasn't fixed in Amax-II.

|>    My second disappointment came when I tried printing from PenPal. I used
|> letter quality throughout the session. When I tried to print a
document using
|> printer font option, I lost the WYSIWYG feature of PenPal. Fair enough I
|> thought, I'll just use the Amiga font option. The printing speed was so low
|> that I almost fell asleep ( if not for the loud printing noise ) waiting for
|> it to print one page. What's more, the fonts were so chunky that it's
not even
|> fit for my listing output. Am I doing something wrong here or what? What I
|> think will be useful is a screen version of the printer fonts (
especially the
|> proportional spacing font BOLD PS ).

ProWrite provides fonts that give accurate on-screen representations, but
I don't recall seeing a BoldPS equivalent.

I too take offense at the quality of Workbench dot matrix output.  Even since
I first printed something from the notepad, I was severely disappointed. 
I previously had a Mac Plus, which did a much better job outputting to its
ImageWriter.  I can look at the specs and see that my Panasonic has a better
resolution than my ImageWriter, but comparing the output of the two from their
respective computers is like night and day.  Why hasn't somebody developed
better Epson compatible drivers and/or better Workbench fonts.  
What the Mac did was take a larger font
(2X point size for ImageWriter, 3X for LQ) and shrink it down when printing
in best mode.  This works wonders, especially considering its only 9 pins.

Maybe if the workbench drivers were improved significantly, fewer programs
would bulk them and write their own (PageStream, ProWrite, and several
others).

Oh well, enough whining.  For all I know this has been improved under
2.0.  For now, PageStream (with sufficient memory) is your best bet for
getting good output from the Panasonic.  AMAX?   I think its dot matrix
output is DOA (dead on arrival, probably a purely American phrase).  Even
ATM (Adobe Typeface Manager) probably won't help much (if it runs - does
anyone know?).


				-MB-
				     :P Just kidding
----
Robert Huebner		huebner@aerospace.aero.org
			The Aerospace Corporation FFRDC
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