[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 10 January 2014 17:17:55 Al Hartman did opine:

> 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.
>
And you are ignoring the space requirements for a font rendered at at least 
600 dpi, compared to the 7x9 fonts a 9 pin dmp used.  That resolution, in 
terms of storage required, comes at a pretty high price.
 
> 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 ]-
> 
> 
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Cheers, Gene
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