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From: Beebe@SCIENCE.UTAH.EDU ("Nelson H.F. Beebe")
Newsgroups: comp.laser-printers
Subject: Re: Info on Canon LBP-8A2 wanted
Message-ID: <8706031638.AA09355@brillig.umd.edu>
Date: Thu, 14-May-87 11:28:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: brillig.8706031638.AA09355
Posted: Thu May 14 11:28:11 1987
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I would be rather leary of the Canon LBP-8A2; it was being
offered for $2995 (quantity one) from a local business
products firm in Salt Lake City.  I had one for 3 months and
attempted to develop a TeX DVI driver for it.  After many
long and frustrating trials, I conclude that the downloaded
font support simply does not work correctly.  I can document
this in rather great detail (described in a 9-page letter I
wrote to Canon headquarters) to anyone who is interested.
It IS possible to get TeX output if you send each character
as a raster bitmap, instead of as a downloaded font
character, but this blows up the output file size by a
factor of 10 to 15, and slows the output speed to one page
every 2 to 5 minutes.  It regularly had problems with buffer
overrun with certain types of files, despite my using
X-on/X-off flow control with it.

For Diablo text mode and vector graphics, it works
satisfactorily, and even has some cute features like inverse
video printing.

If you are already stuck with one, the TeX DVI driver for it
is available as part of my public-domain TeX DVI driver
family.
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