Re: HP Laserjet 4M

[dangardace@aol.com (DangardAce)]

John Fulton writes:

>Does anyone know whether the various third-party HP drivers for a GS would
>allow a GS to print via an HP Laserjet4M? 

No, none of them probably would, and I'll tell you why in a few sentences from
now..

The HP LaserJet 4M is a PostScript printer.  The generic LaserWriter driver for
the GS _Should_ work with it..

>My wife's Eo talks to the HP 4M via the parallel port. She uses a driver for
>an HP III; that works fine.  So I'm assuming that a DeskWriter driver for the
>GS might drive the HP 4M, but does anyone know for sure????

That would be highly doubtful.. the DeskWriter is essentially a 'dumb' printer
that waits for the computer to create pages of text/graphics in its memory and
dump it to the printer.  Macs use
QuickDraw ROM routines to internally draw the page in the computer's memory so
the DW is considered to be a QuickDraw-driven printer.  Your wife's EO probably
uses a similar scheme,
since the HP III can also accept HP-GL commands, which are different from PS
and
make up a proprietary HP page definition language.

The HP 4M is a Level 2 PostScript laser printer that doesn't understand
QuickDraw commands.
The HP III is also a PostScript laser printer.. until Apple decides to make an
equivalent of
its LaserWriter 8.0 driver for the IIGS (fat chance) or some third party writes
an enhanced PostScript
driver for the IIGS (even fatter chance) or HP writes one (hard laugh!)

I don't remember how Harmonie worked (whether or not it did direct QuickDraw to
HPGL translation or just used QD to make the page in computer RAM) but my guess
is it WOULD NOT work for the HP4M..

DangardAce@AOL.COM
"Apple II Forever.. unless you're John Dvorak"