Re: parallel card

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

"Michael Y. Su" <msu76@bellatlantic.net> wrote:

>Joe Kohn wrote:
>
>> >> Sometimes, speed is not even an issue.
>>
>> It _is_ when someone makes a statement that serial is faster than parallel,
>> which is what brought me into this conversation. It's not.
>>
>> I really have nothing further to say on the subject, except that if folks
>> want to learn what it takes to connect and use an HP printer with a IIGS,
>> they can at http://www.crl.com/~joko
>>
>> Joe
>
>Joe,
>
>I believe you.
>
>I just can't believe that no one out there has the gear to do a test run.
>
>Well, I'm going to be sending out an order for Harmonie soon.  And I'm
>currently on the heels of a parallel card.  And I've got both AWGS and AW.
>As soon as I put everything together, I'll do some empirical print-tests;
>unless, someone else decides to take the burden.

That's great!  I think you will find that it makes a big difference
with AWGS but not much of a difference with AW.  Which is
what everyone has been saying all along.  ;-)

I understand Joe's point about AWGS as do most of the folks
here I trust, but I hope Joe understands what the rest of us
are saying about AW Classic.

>Of course, at my current rate, I wouldn't be able to do any kind of
>comprehensive testing anytime soon.
>
>In the meantime, Supertimer is right.  I'm just trying to hammer out the
>kinks.  I remember trying to print WYSIWYG on the IW was hard enough.  I
>vaguely remember that you had to print it condensed just for it to come out
>normal.  (I haven't printed anything on the GS in 8 years...  --cobwebs-- )
>
>Now with this 4x font thing.  Do I reformat the document before I shoot it
>out?  I don't remember any 4x option.  And do I still have to condense
>t?  -oh boy-  It's obvious Apple never bothered fixing this mess.  I wonder
>why not.  And I'm suprised there hasn't been a third party solution for all
>this confusion.

There IS a third party solution: Pointless from Joe Kohn's
Shareware Solutions II which is a TrueType font interpreter
for the IIGS.

You don't have to reformat your document at all.  It is
automatic.  And Macs and PCs do it too, but they do it
transparently as the IIGS does.

You just type, edit, and save your document as you
normally would.  But the screen resolution is 4x less
fine than the printer's.  So the computer shows you a
font of one size and sends a font 4x the size to the
printer.

Looking at it another way, if the printer used the same
font as the monitor without enlarging it resulting in
jaggedness, you'd end up with REALLY tiny print.
The printer needs a font 4x the size to generate the
same WYSIWYG image as on your screen.

Again, you do nothing.  Even when you had your dot
matrix IW, the IIGS (or Mac or PC) was STILL sending
a larger font to the printer.  Only since IW's resolution
is not as good, it was a font 2x the screen font's size
rather than 4x.

On a Mac or PC or IIGS with Pointless, you don't have
to worry at all.  That's because on all three systems,
you have one TrueType file per font and the computer
will generate all sizes from that one file.

On a IIGS without Pointless (or on older Mac or PC
operating system versions), you needed to have
many different sized fonts.  The small ones you used
for display.  The computer selected the larger ones
transparently for printing.

What does all this mean for the IIGS user with the
laser or ink jet printer?  It means the easiest solution
is to get Pointless from Shareware Solutions II.  Or
you can keep a bunch of large sized bitmap versions
of each font in the fonts folder (for example, if you
had Courier 12 for display you would need Courier 24
to print to an IW or Courier 36 to print to a LaserJet
otherwise the printer would have to use Courier 12
which would result in jaggedness...but if you had
Pointless, you'd only need Courier TT, the TrueType
version, since it makes all sizes).