[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Frank Swygert]

Unless something has changed very recently, HP laser printers still have
built-in Postscript interpreters.  At least they did the last time I
looked.

===========================

SOME do, but the cheaper ones use the PC to do all the interpreting. The CoCo, however, isn't capable of generating PostScript. I suppose you might be able to write a program that would convert from ASCII text to PS if you have one with a built-in character set. I'm not sure the CoCo could handle that, but it might handle enough to do a simple ASCII to PS text only conversion.

What we are referring to when we say "modern printers" are mainly the sub-$100 USB inkjets. I couldn't find any new production printers that have PostScript built-in like many 1980s models did. I remember you could get font cartridges for them. All the new production printers rely on the PC for the font files and translation -- that's why the drivers are several megabytes (some of the HP drivers are 10MB +). The PS driver for the old Laserjet 4/5/6 (the small desktop models, 5p and such) is just under 1MB, but I'm uncertain if that is on top of the normal HP driver (a translator) or it will run alone (probably will run alone...).

-- 
Frank Swygert
Editor - American Motors Cars Magazine
www.amc-mag.com