🚀 go-pugleaf

>What is happening is that the range of reproduction quality is getting
>compressed towards the middle.  I am happy to see less memeograph (sp?)
>and draft quality dot matrix output.

And less typewriter with a bad ribbon, for that matter.

>I don't think the laserprinters themselves are necessarily to blame for
>the cases of lowered quality.  Sometimes the software driving them doesn't
>take advantage of the resolution available.

I think an even more important problem is that the person using the printer
and software doesn't pay any attention to the technological limits of what
they're working with. I will posit that if you pay any attention at all, you
can generate output on a laserprinter that is perfect acceptable in a
commercial printing environment. I do it with OtherRealms. To do it, you
have to remember your limitations. If you do things like 6pt type or
fountains on a laserwriter, you're going to look stupid, and stupid is what
I claim you'll be. But you can generate just as good a publication without
fountains and 6pt. type by designing to the media. 

It's not an inherent problem with the software, the printers, the technology
or anything. It's a problem with the people who are trying to do things they
should know better than. 

(analogy time: if someone laid out a newsletter as though it was going to be
printed out on a laserprinter and printed it on a dot-matrix, people would
laugh at them. If he instead designed something that required the Lino to
print and printed it out on a laserprinter, they'd bitch about the
technology. So it goes....)

If you understand what you're doing and design to your limitations, you can
put together a reasonable document under almost any conditions. But if you
ignore the limitations and design super-whizzy gosh-wows (in many cases, of
marginal advantage at that in the case of things like fountains. Fountains
are in most cases nothing more than a faddish "gee, look what I can do"
show-off) oblivious to reality, you're going to be disappointed. Is that the
fault of the system? Or the user?

>And I have to wonder
>if the reproduction stage(s) after the laserprinter retain what quality
>the laserprinter does generate.  A friend of mine has a 300dpi laserprinter
>that generates beautiful output.  Run this through a photocopy machine,
>(even a big Kodak one, which has been the best I've found) and it looks
>pretty sad.

It depends. My stuff comes out pretty good. Not as good as offset (which is
why OtherRealms is offset) but if you avoid some pitfalls, you're
photocopying can work out quite nicely. One thing to avoid is lots of black.
Replace it with something like a 60% or 70% grey instead. The effect is
essentially the same, and it reproduces much cleaner.