Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!tekig5!tekig4!briand
From: briand@tekig4.TEK.COM (Brian Diehm)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: 6.0.2 laserwriter bug (and slowness)
Message-ID: <3366@tekig4.TEK.COM>
Date: 28 Oct 88 17:50:00 GMT
References: <74884@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: briand@tekig4.TEK.COM (Brian Diehm)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 42

>Has anyone else noticed problems with the new laserwriter stuff in 6.0.2? If
>you turn on "unlimited downloadable fonts" it will occasionally botch out a
>font change and print some text out in Courier. It's not cleanly
>reproducible, but I see it fairly consistently.

Have definitely NEVER seen this one, and we have 10 Macs driving 2 LW+ at the
office. Nor have I seen it in my home system, Mac+ & LW+, downloading the Stone
set repeatedly.

>Also, while they do document that printing with that option turned on will
>be slower, I find the speed loss to be somewhere between painful and
>unacceptable. A page with four fonts (garamond, garamond bold, and Univers
>in both 45 and 65) will print out in a couple of minutes normally -- last
>night, turning on the option, it took 20. ugh!

I have not noticed this either. At work, we have PostScript Version 42.0, at
home I have the older and slower Version 38.?, and in neither case will a
complex page of downloaded stuff take more than about 1.5 min.

>Any suggestions on how to optimize pages for printing in the new regime? My
>guess (untried) is to download the common fonts and lock them in memory,
>which will force MORE swapping for the lesser faces. Anyone got a better
>feel for this stuff?

Sounds about right as a guess, but I wouldn't hard load more than two, because
you have really only memory enough for 3 simultaneously. There was a company
who was making a 1Meg add-on board for LW & LW+, but they stopped producing it
because the memory was getting too expensive. They wouldn't even sell me an
empty board, because they simply didn't have any left. Too bad, because they
weren't using 1Meg SIMMs, but 256K SIMMs. Forgot the company's name, but could
look it up if necessary. Anyway, it would give you 24 downloadable fonts, which
I would still like.

A final not on this: PageMaker (at least 3.0) has ALWAYS had the "unlimited
downloadable fonts" feature built in. They really were doing something valuable
with their own Aldus Prep file besides hairlines. It works flawlessly and
pretty quickly. But then, Chuq, you've always been a RSG man. . . :-)

-- 
-Brian Diehm     (SDA - Standard Disclaimers Apply)
Tektronix, Inc.
briand@tekig4.TEK.COM   or  {decvax,cae780,uw-beaver}!tektronix!tekig4!briand