Date: Tue, 23 Dec 1997 14:00:44 +1030 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Greg Pavelcak <gpavelcak@philos.umass.edu> Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Inexpensive Printers that work. Message-ID: <199712230330.OAA00593@word.smith.net.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 22 Dec 1997 13:15:44 CDT." <Pine.OSF.3.96.971222130721.20069B-100000@emily.oit.umass.edu>
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> Happy holidays again. > > Since I'm doing some hardware shopping, I might as well get your views > about printers too. I have an old Epson lq-800. I installed apsfilter > and tried printing to it. The result is slow, poor quality, form-feed- > past-every-other-page-even-with-"suppress-form-feed"-in-the-printcap > output. I know the printer can do better, I've seen it produce better > stuff with some other OS. Is there some software I can add to get > better results with this old pin printer. If not, can you recommend an > ink-jet or a low-end laser that will give good results. Think > inexpensive please. I really don't use a printer much, but I still > haven't trained myself to do all my editing at the screen. Eventually > I still need paper in my hands. Oh well. I do hope that when you are printing to paper, you split things into more paragraphs. Breaking the above into answerable components is pretty tough. Some points for you: - The formfeed issue is a disagreement between ghostscript (the postscript rendering engine used by apsfilter) and your printer over the length of the paper that you are using. It sounds as though ghostscript expects the paper to be larger than you are using. I would hazard a guess that you are using 8.5x11 sheetfeed, but ghostscript expects you are using letter-size. - The lousy resolution is a speed tradeoff. You can increase the quality of the output by tweaking the arguments to ghostscript in /etc/apsfilterrc. See the ghostscript documentation for details on winding it up, but be prepared to experiment. If you want to buy a new printer, consider the low-end inkjets (Canon, HP, Lexmark, etc.). Even the bottom end of the food chain there is pretty good these days. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ Remember, the race is long, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and in the end it's only with yourself. \\
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