🚀 go-pugleaf

(Honest folks, I don't make a habit of following up my own postings.)

In article <1991Apr5.044905.555@telly.on.ca> I wrote:

>My jury's still out on Pacific Page. It's a good bit cheaper than the HP
>Adobe cartridge, and it's faster, but it has a few quirks. My main beef
>is that it won't allow bin-switching on the Laserjet IID/IIID or IIP with
>the second bin attached. It also has a slight letterspacing difference
>from Adobe, but I'm told this is being fixed in the new release.
>
>Ah, the new release. Pacific Data is the only company I know that has an
>upgrade policy for *hardware*. For $99 plus exchange, they'll switch any
>PacificPage cart for the newest version.
>
>If the new cart, version 4.0, fixes the letterspacing problem (a subtle
>one, which only shows up when using dvips), then I'll have no qualms
>with PP.

UPDATE: My version 4.0 cart came yesterday.

Yes, it does fix the letterspacing problem. According to the specs on
the box, PP 4.0 is supposed to be compatible with Adobe PostScript
version 51.9.

Yes it is faster, especially on graphics. A 130K gif file that was printed
using the 'gif2ps' program took 3:41 to print on the old PP cart, 1:47 on
the new (a 52% improvement). Text using built-in fonts is also faster but not
as dramatically. My sample dvips test offered times of 2:19 versus 1:55 (21%).

(Then for those who are still impatient, PP has announced an Intel
i960-based accelerator card (to fit in the slot normally occupied by
add-on memory) that claims even faster Postscript processing. Is this
the first RISC-based PostScript engine officially announced?)

There are also a number of more cosmetic changes. The manual looks more
polished, but still has a a way to go to match the slickness of the HP
cartridge's documentation. The cart itself looks a bit neater, sporting
some of the embossed racing stripes etc. Like, wow.

It now can now work with as little as 1.5 Meg RAM as opposed to the
previous minimum of 2.5. That still sounds like it could impose some
limits.

The PP still does not support duplex printing on the IID or IIID, nor bin
switching on those printers or the IIP with the second bin attached.
Further, there appers to be no forthcoming fix from PP  for this. The HP
cartridge comes with documentation on the 'statusdict' commands that
enable these features for their implementation, and is still the only
route for users who need this feature. The HP test page is also prettier.

-- 
Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
      evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!attcan!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
"This is the mother of all playoff series!" -- Calgary hockey announcer