Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!lethe!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cbmvax!cbmehq!cbmger!peterk
From: peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga Print Quality
Keywords: Desktop Publishing, Word Processing
Message-ID: <641@cbmger.UUCP>
Date: 14 Dec 90 16:24:52 GMT
References: <47347@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY)
Organization: Commodore Bueromaschinen GmbH, West Germany
Lines: 43

In article <47347@apple.Apple.COM> farrier@Apple.COM (Cary Farrier) writes:
>
>After a little reading on printer drivers, I found out that (I think) 
>that the printer drivers require the application to do all the imaging, 
>then pass a bitmap or rast port to the driver to dump. 

Yes.
 
>I mean, the application should tell the driver "Draw this text in this
>font at this location in this point size", and then the driver can 
>do the best that it can, and remove the burden of some quality optimizing
>techniques from the application (or even the user). 

But to achieve this, every driver would have to know every existing
font in every available size, or every driver would have to have a
font scaling machine incorporated. I fear this is not feasible.

And "try the best it can" would always lead to different results on
different printers. So the word processing software simply wouldn't
know how many characters fit on one line (prop spacing!) and it wouldn't
be able to help the user in correct hyphenation. Or would you let this 
also to the printer driver? :-)

The Amiga OS tries to get true copies of the screen bitplanes on every
graphics capable printer, also dumb ones. You can choose density and
anti-alisasing to improve quality. But there is no font engine built
into the printer drivers.

>Also, why aren't there any large font sizes included with the system
>software?  I mean up to 72 point and beyond?

This is probably simply due to diskette space. If you have really big
fonts, you only can put one or two on one diskette, and the Amiga OS
is still distributed on floppies (not on tape, like UNIX).

>Perhaps these have been addressed in WB2.0, I hope so.

In WB 2.0 you have already simplified scalable fonts, a real scalable
font engine (I think Compugraphic fonts) is said to appear soon.

-- 
Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel  // E-Mail to  \\  Only my personal opinions... 
Commodore Frankfurt, Germany  \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk