Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!netnews.upenn.edu!eniac.seas.upenn.edu!ranjit
From: ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Ranjit Bhatnagar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: 1.3 Printer Drivers
Message-ID: <5099@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 10 Sep 88 05:16:15 GMT
References: <388@richp1.UUCP> <371@quintus.UUCP> <4695@cbmvax.UUCP>
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Ranjit Bhatnagar)
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 40

In article <4695@cbmvax.UUCP> daveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) writes:
>>1)  Am I confused about the 1.3 driver or Epson X printers?  Is there
>>    some way to get it to make two passes?
>>
>	No, not without altering the current code.  This strangness of
>only printing every second dot is a hardware/software limitation of SOME
>printers.  It is a hardware limitation in that they physically can't do
>it without over heating the print head.  It is a software limitation in
>that printers which have this hardware limitation SHOULD (in my opinion)
>make up for it in software.  

Nevertheless, tens of thousands of printers don't, and that's tens
of thousands of reasons why the printer driver should support 2-pass
printing for higher resolution.  If we had made excuses like "the
Amiga SHOULD do windowing in hardware," Intuition would be pretty boring.

>The trouble with trying to write a printer driver (like the EpsonX)
>that works over a wide range of printers is that you don't know if the
>printer is going to have the abovbe smarts or not.  If you code the smarts
>into the printer driver then some printers will be doing twice the work.
>If you don't then some printers will miss every second dot.  Its a tough
>call.

It could be a configurable option, or there could be two printer
drivers, one with two-pass and one without.  It's just silly to throw
away the highest resolution mode of (say) a quarter of all printers,
because they SHOULD have been designed better in the first place.  I
can't imagine it would take more than 100 bytes of code to support two-pass
printing.

Not to disparage the designers of the printer drivers - overall, the software's
pretty neat.  But making excuses like this doesn't seem quite right...


	-Ranjit


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