Sidebar on printers -- or part two of documentation story?

By Donald Jenner

Printing from microcomputers has changed a lot since the days of the ubiquitous Epson MX-80 and assorted daisy-wheel printers.  Classy printers are all over the place, usually at deep discount.  What's the best choice?

Naturally, there is no one solution.  After several years advising clients, I've found some solutions are more generally acceptable than others.  Here are, respectively, basic all-purpose, low-cost color and best-of-show options that work.

Software is the first element in all cases.  In days gone by, the trick was to transfer as much of the printing process as possible to as smart a printer as one could afford.  PostScript printers, with on-board general purpose microprocessors and lots of memory (sometimes even a local hard disk) are typical of that approach.  Today's more powerful desktop computers with multitasking operating environments mean that a large part of the printing process can go on as a background process on the desk.  This translates to a saving in printer costs without output penalties.

A good example of this is Zenographics' SuperPrint for Microsoft Windows.  It represents -- for the printers and film recorders it serves -- a very dramatic improvement over the Microsoft-supplied Windows printing software.  It is faster than PostScript.  It handles just about everybody's outline fonts.  It does a better job with graphics.  It operates with less printer memory on laser printers, and makes low-end printers -- Deskjets, PaintJets and Epson-compatible dot-matrix printers -- perform like champs.  We use it about ninety-eight percent of the time, in preference to the much slower PostScript, and substantially less able PCL drivers for our LaserJet III.

We've been beta-testing the soon-to-be-released (at this writing) version 2.0 of SuperPrint; it adds print-to-file support for Agfa Matrix and Management Graphics film recorders and the Canon Color Copier/Laser printer, as well as a range of color thermal transfer printers.  Using this over-the-counter product means that a user can create a SuperMetafile and send it to a SuperPrint-equipped service bureau (or corporate printing station on a network) for output using that system's high-end device driver, as well as getting the best out of standard desktop printers.

We've been unimpressed with font-managers (notably, Adobe Type Manager); SuperPrint's SuperText font-manager does a better job.  SuperText 1.10 comes with the basic PostScript roster of fonts in Nimbus Q variants; the 2.0 version will ship with 35 fonts (including those now supplied as optional extras) and will offer some additional fonts (Bitstream Charter and Agfa Compugraphics Futura) upon request, for free.  You can build screen fonts, or generate them on the fly -- important with something like PageMaker or Ventura.  

Zeno's approach is simple -- they will use everybody's fonts; if you have Adobe or Hewlett-Packard, Nimbus or Bitstream, or Agfa Intellifonts, SuperPrint will use them.  If you get an interesting font as part of another product -- like our favorite Nimbus Q Vivaldi, supplied as part of Micrografx Designer -- SuperPrint can use it.  Corel users:  Once Corel cleans up the defective fonts in Corel Draw 2.0 (expected in the maintenance release by June '91), all those fonts will be convertible to Adobe format and usable with SuperPrint; many work fairly well now.

Zenographics also has superior rasterizing technology.  This is the process by which vector and other kinds of information change to a bitmap pattern for hardcopy output.  Zeno is known for its expertise in this technology; it is the heart of the company's expensive DOS products.  SuperPrint uses an improved version of this.  It also takes bitmap images in various design programs, and intelligently processes them.  In the new version, this has been dramatically enhanced.  A landscape image created in Corel Draw, with two large color bitmaps, used to produce a six megabyte intermediate file; the new version built a file around one-tenth that size, and printed across the network to our color proof printer in about five minutes.

SuperQueue, the SuperPrint print spooler, is a very powerful replacement (usable only with SuperDrivers, sadly) for the Windows print spooler, and works well across the network.  It automatically senses the SuperDriver/printer combination called for by the intermediate spooler file created from the application and manages the print queue.

The general view in this shop used to be that no on-the-fly font program would ever be as fast as hardware fonts.  Zeno's comprehensive approach tested well, sometimes coming very close to native printer mode.  The new version improves on this.  SuperPrint 2.0 builds the appropriate fonts and sizes for a print job, then downloads the font to the printer.  After the initial page, subsequent pages print at maximum rated speed.  After the job finishes, SuperPrint cleans up after itself, leaving the printer will a blank memory, ready for the next job.

In short, SuperPrint is an amazing product, and pretty much the standard which Adobe and Microsoft (respectively, the old standard-maker and the would-be new standard-maker in the printing business) have to match.  Um, don't hold your breath....  But this leads naturally to the question of hardware.

In the basic all-purpose category, there is no need to settle for less-than-laser quality, thanks to Hewlett-Packard.  The DeskJet (for use with IBM-compatible machines) and DeskWriter (for use with Apple Macintosh machines) offer exceptional print quality on plain paper, in a small package, with less noise and ozone polution than a laser printer.  For most office automation applications, this represents an attractively priced printing solution.  Even in networked offices, a couple of these printers pair well as backups with the central laser printer.  

Low-cost color printing is also a Hewlett-Packard specialty.  The HP PaintJet is not a replacement for a high-quality color thermal transfer printer, but the desktop model fits places where the fancier printer won't (it is the smallest of the available color inkjet printers), offers acceptable proof-printing and can be remarkably nimble.  It is also much cheaper.  Plan to use a range of drivers; SuperPrint works well for most things, but we've found that the Micrografx Windows driver is a "must" for use with Designer (though the new version of Designer may fix that).  Corel Draw users:  Print out the .CDR file with the color chart matching the process-color version supplied with the program documentation.  The color match is truly amazing.

Laser printers represent the most complex printing solution.  Every vendor has one or more to choose from.  Most vendors use one of three basic engines -- from Canon, Ricoh or TEC; one notable exception is Kyocera, which builds its own.  The difference in laser printers boils down to features in the vendor's on-board firmware.

Of the various printers tried over the years, Hewlett-Packard's LaserJet III stands out for one reason especially:  The company's "resolution enhancement" technology produces smoother curves and more nearly perfect print than its rated 300 dots per inch suggests.  In fact, the type looks as good under the loop as a 600 dpi Varityper printer.  The quality difference, when compared to other 300 dpi laser printers, is visible even without the loop.  Raster images -- scanned photos, etc. -- can be printed using screen frequencies close to those normally associated with typesetting systems.

As this story developed, HP announced a new LaserJet IIIP.  This is a compact version of the LJIII, using the smaller, slower engine also used in the IIP model, but including a faster processor and more memory.  Most important, the IIIP includes the latest version of Hewlett-Packard's Printer Control Language, PCL5, and resolution enhancement technology.  HP did not make one of these available for testing on the bench, but reports suggest the machine has the print capabilities absent the speed of the full-size system.  One major trade publication has reported a flaw in the implementation of PCL5 in this machine, which results in the printer being unable to print bitmap graphics at greater than 72 dots per inch.  Another possible problem area is the paper path in the smaller machine; there is a sharp curve to be negotiated, likely to be jam-prone with thick stock.  On the up-side, the LJIIIP has a multi-size paper tray (unlike the "full service" machine).

This new printer lists for $1,595; the standard LJIII goes for around $1,800 with a couple extra megabytes of printer memory.  The question then is, how fast will the deep discounters be able to get the new printer and butcher the price.

If you >must< have PostScript -- and there are times when PostScript is simply indispensable -- HP offers a superior PostScript add-on.  The weakness in HP's PostScript solution is that the printer cannot switch between native (and HP-proprietary) PCL and PostScript without out a powerdown-and-cartridge-change.  Pacific Data Systems, used to one-upping HP, now advertises a better-than-HP PostScript cartridge with just such a feature.

There is a weakness in some laser printers; this one seems to be a flaw in the Canon printer engine.  Printers based on this engine appear to have problems with heavy paper.  Heavy stock is used for report covers and special work (name tags and the like) and a laser printer should handle this without demur; Canon-based printers balk at it.  The toner does not fuse properly, and will flake off, especially if the stock has a "laid" finish.  Other print engines seem to do better; in particular, the Kyocera printers we've used appear to combine toner and fuser technology to make a superior print on heavy stock and envelopes.  Sadly, Kyocera is not a widely marketed brand, and the company has grandiose pricing notions; look to spend at least 50 percent more for the Kyocera label (and you still won't get that super HP resolution enhancement, which means spending a lot of money and still getting jaggies).

Is there a place for impact dot-matrix technology?  Indeed there is, and not just for the data-processing mavens who think visible dots are neat.  Low-cost dot-matrix printers can deliver remarkable results; driven with SuperPrint, an Epson LQ model could actually do half-decent halftones.  For people with deep pockets and special needs, perhaps the finest dot-matrix printer we've seen is JDL's 850 series.  This printer has a machine variant of multiple-personality disorder; it thinks it's a printer and a plotter -- it even has a parallel port for the one, and a serial port for the other!  Running through the usual hard-to-read-LCD menu choices allows selection of several different color printer and plotter choices.  Output from the 24-pin head -- in black and 15 other colors -- is exceptional.  In plotter mode, the lines are very nearly as clean as those from a standard pen plotter, and the print quality from the printer mode exceeds anything short of a laser printer.  But this is a specialty product, targeted to CAD users mostly, who need both plotter and printer capabilities, but who have limited desk space.  Consequently, this over-size printer (it does poster-size drawings) costs substantially more than an average laser printer plus a desktop color inkjet printer after on-the-street discounts.


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