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In article <97@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu> ZHAZHIA@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu writes:
>LaserJet Serial II and a HP 7550A Plotter to a Mac? Any suggestions are
>greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
> 

Consider Printworks for the Mac. I used it for almost a year to drive a
LaserImage 2000 with an HP LaserJet emulator card. I eventually
replaced the LaserImage with a LaserWriter II/NTX, because of a growing
need for postscript support.

The package includes a serial cable and software drivers for Canon,
Xerox, Qume, Nec and HP laser printers. They also provide a RAM-based
print spooler, which is useful if you're one of the few people with
>2MB RAM.

Their software turns the HP LaserJet into a 75/150/300dpi ImageWriter.
In 300 dpi mode, fonts 4x the size of the screen fonts are scaled down
to generate 300dpi fonts. If I'm not mistaken, the LaserWriter SC uses
a similar method to generate high-resolution text.  You will probably
want a hard disk since those 48pt fonts do eat up a lot of disk space.

They also support a letter-quality mode which lets you map screen fonts
to the printer's resident fonts. In this mode, ASCII characters are
sent directly to the printer at 19,200 baud, which lets you drive the
printer at its rated speed (I was getting close to 10ppm out of the
LaserImage).  This mode is real useful for dumping large database and
program listings to the printer.  For example, I occasionally print out
250+ page documents, and in letter quality mode I could print out 250
pages in under 30 minutes.  My NTX isn't anywhere near as fast.

Their software is smart enough to preserve tab settings and font styles
such as bold, underline and italic in letter quality mode, so that
you can use the printer's resident helvetica and times fonts, and have
properly aligned multi-column text. It also lets you mix printer resident
fonts with bit maps and with graphic objects. Their high resolution mode uses
a smoothing algorithm for bit maps.

Caveats:

1) The printer needs at least 1MB RAM, because in 300 dpi mode, the
printer driver creates a 300 dpi image of the entire page before
downloading it to the printer. As my printer had 1.5MB, that was never
a problem.

2) You must use their installation disk; you can't simply drag the
printer drivers into the System Folder.

3) I ran into difficulties trying to print from HyperCard. They told me
that it was a known problem, caused by HyperCard apparently bypassing
some sort of standard print routines. Otherwise, I was very pleased
with the product.

4) For best results, get the large fonts off of the LaserWriter SC font disk,
or off of the ImageWriter LQ font disk.

5) You have to use Copy II mac or the SUM's Quick Copy to back up the
oirginal diskette. For some reason, I couldn't make a Finder copy of
the original diskette and then use the backup as an installation disk.
(Quick Copy did say something about the disk being an 800K MFS disk)

Summary: I really like the product. It worked well on a Mac II running
System 6.0., and was really unbeatable when using the laser printer
as a substitute for a high speed line printer.

Hope this helps.
 ---- Brian