[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Al Hartman]

In reply to Gene's last post...

You over estimate the size of the files you would need for fonts, and the 
amount of time to print.

Back in the early days of Zebra Systems, I made the catalogs and even some 
of the manuals in WordStar on an IMSAI with a Z-80 processor running at 
2mhz, printing to an Epson MX-80 F/T printer with a 9600 baud serial 
interface.

I used a program called Fancy Font that would process the ASCII text files 
which contained formatting codes similar to HTML and print the pages.

Fonts were held on single 8inch disks (SSSD), and there were more than one 
font per disk in various sizes. If I specified a size not on the disk, the 
closest size was upscaled to the needed size. The pre rendered fonts, of 
course looked better due to hinting and use of bezier curve formulas.

Here is an example:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/timex/zebrafdd.jpg

It did not take 9 hours to print those two pages. Even when we upgraded to 
an HP LaserJet 500 Plus, and used Fancy Font it still didn't take all day to 
print at 150dpi or 300dpi at 9600 baud.

We upgraded the IMSAI to an MS-DOS clone, and I still used FancyFont and the 
Epson Printer on that to print things (and later the LaserJet). The 
pre-processing was faster, but printing still depended on the speed of the 
printer port. Parallel was faster than Serial, and then the limitation was 
the printer speed.

I still have copies of the MS-DOS software and some font disks, but without 
the manuals I'm not sure I could figure it out today.

-[ Al ]-