Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!a.cs.uiuc.edu!p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies 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