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From: whirt@cup.portal.com (William Bill Hirt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.emulations
Subject: Postscript printers
Message-ID: <39310@cup.portal.com>
Date: 16 Feb 91 03:38:07 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 66

In message <1991Feb14.070253.15390@vicstoy.UUCP>, andrewsr@u2.rutgers.edu 
(Rich Andrews) writes:

>I am considering getting a Postscript printer for my amiga.  The
>models that I am considering are: the TI miscolaser, NEC silentwriter
>2 model 90, QUME 410 or scriptTEN.  Suggestions? (Budget = ~$2000)

One other printer you might want to consider is the HP IIP. I have a IIP
with a Pacific Page Postscript cartridge. It emulates Adobe PS version 51.9.
We have a QMS PS 2220 at work with genuine Adobe Postscript 51.0 and I
haven't found anything yet which prints on one and won't print on the
other. Street price on the IIP is now under $800. The Pacific Page
cart is about $350 and comes with the standard 35 Postscript type families.
You need to add a 2 meg card to the IIP for Postscript work. I got a 4
meg card (populated) for under $500 for my IIP. Another $150 or so mail
order can get you the under the printer 250 page sheet feeder tray.

I have a friend which has the HP Postcript cartridge for the IIP and
has found it to work well with ProPage for several months now. The
advantage of the Pacific Page cart over the HP cart is that you can
send a software reset to the printer to switch between Postscript and
HP PCL mode. The HP cart requires you to remove it to drop back to PCL
mode. 

If you look around, you may be able find a close-out LaserJet II for
around $1000. Adobe makes a Postscript cartridge for the II that sells
for between $250-275 mail order. The Adobe cart only works on the
LaserJet II. HP's cart works on the IIP, III, and IIID and is a licensed
version of Adobe Postscript.

>How well does some of the packages for the amiga (ProPage 2.0, ProDraw,
>Pagestream 2.1) use these printers?  Could I buy PS fonts and download
>them instead of buying extra hardware (how well does that work).

I have used ProPage 2.0 to print to my IIP with the Postscript cart. The
change in ProPage 2.0 is that you must use the Postscript fonts in your
document. Before, ProPage would convert the CompuGraphic fonts to the
approriate Postscript fonts at print time. Why they changed this I have
no idea and I have yet to get a response yet from Gold Disk why this 
change was made.

The Gold Disk CompuGraphic font series has a Postscript font downloader
included in each font package. ProPage can also be told to download
any fonts you are using in your document at print time. There are a 
number of Type 1 Adobe fonts around from IBM and Mac land that you can use.
The main thing is creating the AFM and metric files for use in ProPage. 
There are several PD and shareware programs which do this. The other thing
is you need to have enough additional memory in the printer to hold all
your non-resident fonts while doing your print job. If you plan to to
use a lot of downloaded fonts, 4 megs of printer memory would be a lot
better than 2 megs. A 2 meg expansion on a IIP gives you 2.5 megabytes
of memory which would probably be sufficent 99% of the time.

>Could I get a parallel PS printer to work under A-Max?  I would be
>interested in using FreeHand, PageMaker, etc.  What drivers would I
>need.  How well does A-MaxII handle the parallel connection?

The IIP and the Pacific Page cart support serial communications if you 
need to go this way with Amax.

Bill

whirt@portal.com
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