🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <20944@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) writes:
>Would someone who has actually used the SoftStyle LaserStart printer drivers
>please E-mail to me and tell me how well they work?

[ I tried to email the response, but the mailer barfed.  So here... ]

Ok, I have actually used the Laserstart driver with an old Laserjet.
Memory was scarce on the Jet so life was real tough.  First, the Jet and
the Mac can go at 19.2k baud so your calculations at 9600 baud should be
halved.  I don't have the book on the Jet in front of me but it might use
a repetition coding algorithm for compression so throughput might be
actually be better than worst case baud rate calculations.  At any rate,
the LaserJet makes crisper than Imagewriter looking quality documents at
150 dpi MAX.  It don't go 300 dpi, except when using built in fonts for
text printing.

As far as fonts go, the early versions of LaserStart used built in fonts
for draft printing but you had to print at the point size of your fonts
or it looked stupid.  It would make up for point size changes with
character spacing.  Just like the Imagewriter dialog; draft is text only,
faster is 75 dpi on the Jet, and Best is 150 dpi on the Jet.

Now the trouble I was having was that large complex images would overflow
the memory on the Jet and would come out on two or more pages.  The answer
to that problem was more memory (LaserJet+ or II) but I couldn't buy the
answer (not my printer).  This typically only happened in "Best" mode.

BTW, the latest versions of LaserJet should have the ability to mix built
in 300 dpi font text with graphics if you so request; driving down the
amount of memory used in creating the image while raising the quality.
I never got a chance to try it, we finally bought a LaserWriter+.

P.S. the last update to LaserStart I got seems to be PrintWorks.  It looks
like they have rolled support into it for a whole lot of devices but I
haven't really looked at it closely so I can't really say.  It might just
be a shipping error.  The capabilities may have been expanded but I really
don't have a LaserJet (or a desire) to test it.
-- 
"The value of knowledge lies not in its accumulation,        Howard C. Simonson
   but in its utilization."    E. Green                      amdahl!howard

[ The disclaimer for this message may be found in a previous article ]