X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 7997;andrew.cmu.edu;Ted Anderson
Received: from corsica.andrew.cmu.edu via trymail for +dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests)
ID </afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/Mailbox/QZ0W6Fi00UkVAOP04u>;
A bunch of people seem to be asking stuff about printing to the laserwriter,
so here's a big posting to cover all the questions:
1. When I made up transparencies on my mac, they looked fine. When I
brought them into the mac shop to be printed on the LW, they came out all
wrong. Whats going on here?
Although the Mac advertises as WYSIWYG, it is not necessarily so. Fonts
that are displayed on the screen are not the same size/shape etc as the
postscript fonts that appear printed on the LW. So the laserwriter reformats
everything as best it can with the font it is told to use. (All right,
LW hackers, thats not a scientific explanation, but it'll do.) The
easy solution I've discovered for this is to pop a laserwriter driver into
your system folder. If you are pressed for space, you don't need the laser
prep, just the driver. Then, before you start working with any formatting,
select the chooser from the apple menu (oh, you also need to install this
DA if you don`t have it.) It'll ask you a whole bunch of stuff about
appletalk and the laserwriter. NOTE: you do NOT need appletalk or a laserwriter
or even a printer at all to do this. The goal is to make the mac THINK
that its printing to a laserwriter. Then, the mac will try to use
laserwriter spacing, etc and things should come out properly.
2. I've noticed the laserwriter doesn't print along the outer 1/4" of the page.
Is there any way to change that?
Nope. Sorry. Since the LW is such a small printer, it needs that space around
the edges of the paper to pull the paper through. Its very irking, but its
a fact of life.
3. How do I keep a startup page from printing when I turn on the laserwriter?
This has been beaten to death on this bboard for a while now, but basically
tehre are two ways to do it:
1. (If you're not a postscript hacker). Pull out the paper tray an inch
or so when the LW starts up, until the orange light goes on steadily.
2. (If you are a postscript hacker). Damn. I thought I rememebred this
one. Basically it involves getting into interactive mode with the laserwriter
(or sending a script to the LW interactively), and changing a variable
called "setdostartpage." Sigh. Is tehre someone out there who could
write the actual script to be downloaded to the LW and post it?
3. I just did a paper using the "london" font, which I really like. But
when I printed it on the LW, it said "Font London not found, using bitmap."
London is right there on my system, why can't it find it?
This was the most commonly asked question when I was managing a macintosh
center in college. So here's my treatise on the subject:
There are two types of fonts: screen fonts and printer fonts. The screen
fonts are the ones you (obviously) see on your screen, and also the ones
you install in your system file using font/da mover. These are called bitmap
fonts, becasue they are made up of single dots (bits) on your screen. When
you print on an imagewriter (this may have changed, I don't know how the
new imagewriters work), these bits are downloaded directly to the paper. If
a dot is black on the screen, it is printed on the page. So you can always
print any font you want on an imagewriter.
However, the laserwriter is infinitely different. The laserwriter contains
a whole differetn set of fonts, called postscript outline fonts. These are
mathematical descriptions on fonts, rather than bits. What fonts exist in
your laserwriter depends on the particular laserwriter. None of them
will have London. What your macintosh application does when it prints is
send the NAME of the fonts down to the printer, and the printer calls up
that piece of code for the font to print everything. If there isn't a match
between the name the app sends it and the list of internal fonts, the LW
will do one of two things -- it will substitute another font it knows
(courier for monaco, times for new york, etc), or it will bitmap the
screen font onto the page.
When the laserwriter makes bitmaps, they will usually come out looking ragged
and strange. This is because of the differences in resolution between the
screen and the page. On the screen, there are 72 dots per inch (dpi). The
laserwriter prints at 300 dpi. Some other printers can print at even higher
resolutions (400, 1200, etc.). In any case, the size of a dot on the screen
is a lot bigger than the size of a dot on the page. This is why fonts look
ragged on the printer. There is a "font smoothing" option in many applications;
sometimes this makes the fonts look better when printed, but often doesn't work very well at all. Your best bet is to stick to fonts that the laserwriter
has in memory.
On interesting quirk of having fonts in the laserwriter is that these mathematical
formulas for fonts can be scaled to any size. You may only have four sizes
of a particular font installed in you system, but you can print any size you
want on the LW. Depending on the program you use, larger or wierd size fonts
will either not be available or will come out looking really wierd on the screen.
