SuperPrint -- with 2.0 first look

By Donald Jenner


Printing out hardcopy versions of your work has changed.  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 is faster than competing printer managers such as ATM.  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.  The newest version -- tested in late-beta copy -- will even produce files for use with off-site Agfa-Matrix film recorders and the fabulous Canon Color Laser Copier, as well as a list of color thermal transfer printers, including those from Mitsubishi and Shinko (Mitsubishi under another name) and Tektronix.

We've been unimpressed with font-managers (notably, Adobe Type Manager); SuperPrint's SuperText font-manager does a better job.  Zeno's approach is simple -- they will use everybody's fonts.  The product is packaged with the basics in Nimbus Q form.  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 probably use it.  Corel users:  Once Corel cleans up the defective fonts in Corel Draw 2.0 (expected in the maintenance release by June '91), many of those fonts will be convertible to Adobe format and usable with SuperPrint; many work fairly well now.

SuperPrint can build screen fonts, or generate them on the fly (essential for PageMaker and Ventura).  Taking that one step further, it can also generate printer fonts on the fly, then download them to your printer, softfont-fashion.  This means that multiple-copy print jobs on the laserprinter are effectively using on-board fonts, and print at the maximum speed of the print engine.

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.  When the job finishes, SuperPrint cleans up after itself.

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.

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