[3587] in comp.os.os2.announce archive
BETA FREEWARE DRIVER: enhanced postscript driver
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Fitzsimmons)
Sun Nov 23 13:47:59 1997
To: os2ann.DISCUSS@bloom-picayune.MIT.EDU
Date: 23 Nov 1997 13:10:00 -0400
From: pfitz@ican.net (Peter Fitzsimmons)
Reply-To: pfitz@ican.net
Reply-to: pfitz@ican.net
Submitted by: pfitz@ican.net (Peter Fitzsimmons)
[Followups directed to comp.os.os2.beta]
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Freeware:
A modified postscript driver that heavily favors your printers' built in
fonts. ftp://rozeware.lionsgate.com/aware/psdrv4.zip
Netscape/2 is not printer friendly; it only uses screen (not printer) fonts.
This causes one, or both, of the following to happen each time you print:
1) All fonts are downloaded (printing a simple 1-line email that quotes 1
line from a previous email will download 3 fonts).
2) All text is "rendered" into bitmaps (so "text" is not sent to your
printer, but very inefficient (and perhaps ugly) "pictures of the
text")
In most cases, with my NEC Postscript printer (silentwriter2 model 90), case
#2 was happening -- the aforementioned 1-line email required a spool file
(when printed in "device specific format", which is how you measure the
amount of data sent to your printer) to be nearly 1 MB (yes -- 1,000,000
bytes!)
I have been keeping IBM's "Web Explorer", which is very printer friendly,
around just for printing, but was getting tired of this.
Well, I finally got off my butt and fixed the problem for PS printers. When
a program asks the driver if it has fonts for some common screen fonts (Tms
Rmn, Helv, Courier Italic), instead of returning "NO", I map them to names
("Times Roman", "Helvetica" and "Courier Oblique") that virtually every
Postscript printer on the planet supports, and return "YES".
The simple email sample I used went from 1MB to 8K! And, since I am using
my printer's beautiful built in fonts, the output looks twice as good!
I'm sure other types of printers (PCL) suffer from this same problem, but I
only fixed the postscript driver.
Watch ftp://rozeware.lionsgate.com/aware for updates; a temporary site!
Peter Fitzsimmons
President, A:WARE Inc.
pfitz@ican.net
Voice: 905-858-3222
Toronto Canada.
--
Peter Fitzsimmons, Toronto Canada.
email:pfitz@ican.net Voice: 905-858-3222
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