Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site uw-beaver
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!laser-lovers
From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Re: LaserWriter output quality, a review
Message-ID: <1083@uw-beaver>
Date: Wed, 24-Apr-85 17:57:33 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1083
Posted: Wed Apr 24 17:57:33 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Apr-85 08:02:51 EST
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 47

From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier>

Naturally I don't agree with Henry on this; I don't remember having
sent him any samples of ordinary text to compare against. My
recollection is that I sent him various samples of compressed,
expanded, rotated, shrunken, and otherwise transformed text as examples
of what the graphics model could do. The only printout that I sent him
in which letters occasionally touched was the Organized Crime 1040
form, which uses an 8-point Helvetica on which a horizontal compression
transformation of 11/13 has been done to achieve Helvetica Compressed;
this is something that is simply not possible on a LaserJet, because
the letterforms aren't there. If you try to duplicate that same form on
a LaserJet, what you find is that the letters don't fit into the spaces
provided unless you switch to a smaller type face.

Henry is well-known to be a LaserJet lover; I am well-known to be a
LaserWriter lover. I claim my LaserWriter will do X and Y that his
LaserJet won't; he claims his LaserJet will do X and Y that my
LaserWriter won't.  My feeling is that the educated reader of
Laser-Lovers should not believe either of us without hard evidence. I
have in my office hard evidence, consisting of pieces of paper, that
convince me that the LaserWriter output looks nicer and that the fonts
look indistinguishable, but you don't have this evidence and Henry
thinks he has different evidence.

I think that what I would like to do here is to invite supporters of
various laser printers to contribute print samples to some national
publication whose print quality is good enough to show the differences,
and then let the readers of this Laser Lovers group, and the readers of
that national publication, decide for themselves. I would expect that
Imagen and maybe QMS might want to get into this fray, also. I don't
have any obvious candidates for the publication in question, since
laser printers fall in the cracks amongst the topics on which the
fast-turnaround publications are centered. I would guess that the SIGOA
newsletter would be the most appropriate forum for this.

I think it would also be appropriate to have things like the Imagen
12/480 and the Meregenthaler A110 (or whatever it is called) included
here, even though there is no corresponding high-end HP machine. This
would provide a reference for the quality of the printing process, so
that people could see where the distortion was coming from.

Comments? Anybody know if SIGOA would be willing? Anybody volunteer to
referee this?

Brian Reid
Stanford