🚀 go-pugleaf

As a programmer at HP with a Mac at home, I've been trying hard
to connect my Mac to an HP printer.  I have yet to find something
really good.  As soon as there is a good DeskJet driver for the Mac,
I'll buy a DeskJet.

I tried SoftStyle's Printworks.  This is a gereric driver.  They have
one for laser printers and another for dot matrix printers.  I tried the
laser printer one on a friends HP LaserJet.  It had several modes to
select how it would print.  One mode mapped Macintosh fonts to the 
printer's built in HP fonts.  This produced the fastest output but 
your margins and spacings wouldn't line up since the fonts weren't
exactly matched.  Enhancements like bold, italic, etc. usually didn't
work.  For just plain typewriter printing, it worked fine.  Another
mode had the driver build up a bit image of the full page in the Macintosh
using the Macintosh fonts (helped if you had large fonts).  This produced
exact printouts but was painfully slow.  It also meant your LaserJet needed
lots of memory.  My friend's would only print 1/4 of a page this way.

HP's ads imply the DeskJet should work with most LaserJet drivers.  I haven't 
tried this with SoftStyle's nor heard of anyone else trying it.   

There is such a big potential here for a good driver that I just assume
someone will eventually write one.  If someone reading this is, I have
two requests:
	1)  Use the DeskJet's data compression so it won't take
	    a half hour to print a 300 dpi page.
	2)  Have an option to redirect the output to a file.  This
            is so I don't have to have the DeskJet physically connected
	    to the Macintosh (I will have an HP workstation in between). 
	    I want to be able to download the file to the workstation and
	    then I'll ship it out to the printer over LAN.)

Erik Kilk
Signal Analysis Division
Hewlett-Packard