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From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: HP DeskJet Drivers?
Message-ID: <76000253@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 9 Jul 88 19:33:00 GMT
References: <729@esl.UUCP>
Lines: 32
Nf-ID: #R:esl.UUCP:729:p.cs.uiuc.edu:76000253:000:1525
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Jul  9 14:33:00 1988


Re: Printer Drivers

1.  I can't see how the Grappler could avoid producing lousy results.
Most 24-pin printers achieve 180 dpi resolution -- the imagewriter LQ
is 216 dpi, larger by a factor of 6/5.  Since the Grappler is not in
the imaging loop (it just tries to squish bits, right?)  I expect
the 24-pin grappler prints pages that look worse than the Imagewriter
II's output.

2.  Watch an Imagewriter II some day.  I think the driver is HIGHLY
optimized to trim excess data from the transmission stream.  It looks
like it trims the margins from the output data (saving 37 square
inches), AND it skips blank scan lines (as much as 50% of the rest of
the data, if you're printing double-space text).  This reduces the
download information A LOT.

3.  For best results, you need 2.5 * fonts for a 180dpi driver.  The
Apple font scaling algorithms, while fast, produce fairly lousy
results.  What I'm contemplating is writing a very slow combinatorial
optimization procedure to extract an outline font, scale it, and then
re-image the characters.  Then, this batch utility could be used to
produce medium-quality 2.5 * magnified fonts from any given font set.
Are there any font editors out there that do high-quality scaling FROM
BITMAPS (not from splined font representations)?


-- Someone contemplating writing an EPSON LQ printer driver...

Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,ihnp4,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies