Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!cambridge.apple.com!alms From: alms@cambridge.apple.com (Andrew L. M. Shalit) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: HP LaserJet IIP Message-ID:Date: 3 Oct 89 16:13:08 GMT Sender: news@cambridge.apple.com Distribution: comp.sys.mac Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cambridge, MA Lines: 71 First the moral: When HP says "The DeskWriter is our supported Macintosh printer, not the Laserjet IIP", you should believe them. Now the rest of the story: After spending a couple of days with a IIP and MacPrint software, I've come to the conclusion that it isn't a desirable solution for printing on the Macintosh. I'm going to try to return my printer to the store where I got it; that failing, I'll sell it on the open market. Disclaimer: I may not completely understand how this printer and software are supposed to work. I may have missed something. This message is based on my understanding after spending a few sessions of a couple hours each trying to get acceptible performance out of the printer. In the base configuration, the IIP is a very nice letter-quality printer. It's small, light, and very cute. It's 300 dpi, but memory limitations keep it from doing a full page at that resolution. I thought the IIP came with Courier, Times, Helvetica, and Symbol, in a variety of sizes. It doesn't. It comes only with Courier, in 10 and 12 point. Any other fonts have to be loaded from cartridges or built from bit-maps in your computer. Printing with a built-in font (i.e. Courier 10 or 12 point) is quite fast, and doesn't eat up the printer's memory. However, printing anything else is *very* slow. Slow means 2-4 minutes a page. Also, using Macintosh fonts basically sends bits to the printer, so you can't print a whole page of single spaced 300 dpi text. Of course, it tries for 2 or 3 minutes before telling you it's out of memory. MacPrint comes with 4 bitmap fonts. These come in huge sizes, so that they can be scaled down for 300dpi printing (much like the laserwriter SC, I believe). Each font takes about 350K. I had a couple of problems with these fonts. First off, they give them non-standard names. So, instead of 'Times' there is 'CS Times'; instead of 'Courier' there is 'CS Courier'. This means that if I have a thirty page document of mixed Times and Courier, it won't use the MacPrint fonts. I'm supposed to go through my document and manually change every use of Times into CS Times. I guess they don't think people will be working in mixed environments, where you want to print documents on one printer or another. The other problem was that the quality of the screen fonts (e.g. the 12-point of Times) was extremely poor. Some of the characters just looked like splotches of pixels. You could only tell what they were by the context within a word. I managed to get around both the font problems, but it took a little work. First, I renamed the fonts using ResEdit. Then, I replaced the screen sizes with the same fonts from the Apple system. This may have wreaked havoc with wysiwyg printing, but I don't really care about that. I mostly just want nice looking text. Even when I got the fonts basically working, I was still stuck by the fact that I couldn't print a full page of letter quality text in anything but Courier 10 or 12. There are two ways I could upgrade the printer: buy a font cartridge (will give fast printing but for a limited number of type faces; plus, the only cartridges come with non-standard named fonts, e.g. TmsRmn instead of Times), or buy more memory (gives lots of flexibility for $400, but still prints dog-slow). Instead I think I'm going to sell the printer and price out a PLP from General Computer. sigh. Live and learn. -andrew disclaimer again: my opinions are my own, not my companies.