Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!jonabbey From: jonabbey@cs.utexas.edu (Jonathan David Abbey) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer Subject: Amiga text printing Summary: Argh! Non-integer scaling on epson-type dot matrix.. ugh!! Keywords: printing epson mac-envy Message-ID: <96@frio.cs.utexas.edu> Date: 13 Jun 91 17:51:45 GMT Organization: Dept of Computer Sciences, UTexas, Austin Lines: 36 Hello! I recently had the occassion to do some work with ProWrite, only to find that the text printing in graphics on a dot-matrix printer is abysmal. Now, I know the reason for this; the Amiga's screen does not have the same aspect ratio as the printer, nor does it have a dots-per-inch value which is a multiple of that of the printer. This does not assuage my anguish, however, at knowing that the best Amiga word-processing software can't produce results comparable to that done on a Macintosh with 6 year old software. What I want to know is this: Is there any reason why the Amiga's concept of a printer driver couldn't be extended to be aware of fonts and text output as seperate from bitmap-dumping? There is certainly no reason why this feature couldn't be added at some point, even if old programs don't automatically use the feature. I am also aware that Commodore is working on a scalable font technology, but I am not sure that this will address the problems that occur with low-cost dot matrix printers. It would seem to me that it should be possible to take, say, a ProWrite file, examine it to get the text and font information, then print with the screen fonts mapped pixel-to-pixel to the printer, with creative inter-character spacing to take care of the critical page width problem. Having non-integer scaling is just too horrendous for words.. a given character may look different depending on where it is on the page, and the thickness of the strokes varies across the character.. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonathan David Abbey \ "Dudez! Gimme a quarter!" - Aldo Cella the university of texas at austin \ - Dedicated to the Cygnian in all of us. computer science/math?/psychology? \ jonabbey@cs.utexas.edu