🚀 go-pugleaf

>Essentially, what you get for your extra money in one of these "smarter"
>laser printers is a slower laser printer.

>The cheap, fast printers with the simple page description languages can
>generally perform all the desktop publishing needs of a typical user.

>The right software can produce superb looking documents on a plain old
>LaserJet with 64K of memory.  It's all you need for letters, manuals,
>charts tables etc.

>Systems like Postscript are an admirable attempt at presenting a more
>abstract interface, but they are currently not written well enough to
>be fast and cheap.  I'll take typesetting at a full 6 pages per minute
>on a cheap laserprinter over fancy type expansion features on a slower,
>much more expensive printer any day.

Interestingly, Kyocera provides a set of laser printers which are comparable
in price to the LaserJet but also provide a more intelligent page definition
language.  The language, PreScribe, is not Postscript.  I have been quite
surprised at the speed of the machine whether for graphics or text.  The
mid-range machine has 36 built-in fonts, supports down-loadable fonts, and
has a set of meta-fonts for generation of tables of fonts in whatever form
you want.  Once the font is generated, any text using the font is printed
as quickly as the built-in or down-loaded fonts.  Some of the graphics commands
are the standard line, box, circle, ellipse, pattern fill, arrow, pie, etc.

Now, is the speed slowed by these extra capabilities?  Font generation takes
a little time.  Graphics appear to be as fast as any text.  My tests show
ten pages per minute output with mixed text and graphics.
___________________________________________________________________________
John Daleske  Columbus, Ohio.  614-860-4335 | Default disclaimer...
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