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From: maher@clio.sts.uiuc.edu (Patrick Maher)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: dvi driver for Deskjet
Message-ID: <1991May16.202152.11406@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 16 May 91 20:21:52 GMT
References: <9105160331.AA02365@june.cs.washington.edu>
Sender: usenet@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 29

TeXhax@cs.washington.edu writes:

>In texhax 91:021, Bill Lennox (glennox@calstate) requests information
>about dvi drivers for hp deskjet and apple deskwriter. A driver for the
>DeskJet is available at the user-friendly price of $50 from Arbortext Inc,
>Ann Arbor, MI. Their phone no. is (313) 996-3566.

This driver is the driver that comes with Kinch's turbo tex, which is
just a compiled version of the Beebe driver for the original laserjet.
It cannot print direct to the printer; you have to first print to a file.
Since deskjet printing is done by sending a bitmap, this makes the driver
useless for large jobs, and unnecessarily slow for small ones. So, you
definitely should not buy this driver. (I made that mistake.)

Next I shelled out $120 for Personal TeX's driver, which works well, except
it had a bug that prevented it printing many pages. Seems each page printed
took up some memory that was not released, so depending on how many TSR's
I had loaded, the program would say there was not enough memory after
printing 20-40 pages. At the time (about a year ago) the people at Personal
TeX verified that there was this bug, but showed no interest in fixing it.

Coincidentally, I got a cold sales call from Personal TeX today. I told
this person I was very unhappy with the way they treated my problem with
their deskjet driver. After some checking they called back to say the
problem has been fixed in the latest version. They're sending me a copy.
We'll see.

But since the driver that comes with emtex is supposed to work, I'd surely
try that first if I were looking for a deskjet driver now.