Postscript question

>I have a chance to acquire a used 2001-vintage HP laser printer at a good
>price. It uses PostScript Level 2 emulation, as well as HP's PCL 6.
>
>Is that sufficient for most OS X applications, or is there any reason
>to insist on a printer that uses Postscript 3? (I assume it's at least
>as compatible as my current Laserwriter 16/600, but I'd like to be
>sure.)

I have a HP postscript Laserjet 5M from 1997, and it is still going strong.
--
Alan Charlesworth

On Aug 29, 2006, at 7:42 PM, Brian Tokar wrote:

> I have a chance to acquire a used 2001-vintage HP laser printer at
> a good price. It uses PostScript Level 2 emulation, as well as HP's PCL 6.
>
> Is that sufficient for most OS X applications, or is there any reason
> to insist on a printer that uses Postscript 3? (I assume it's at least
> as compatible as my current Laserwriter 16/600, but I'd like to be
> sure.)

I could be wrong about this, but if I remember correctly, PS 3 has
mostly to do with accuracy in color printing. If it's a B&W printer,
it might not be a problem. But I also think that some older PS 2
printers might have trouble if you mix PostScript fonts with True
Type or OpenType (they will either not print or substitute fonts on
you), if that will be an issue for you.

Be sure you check out how much RAM is in the printer, because if
you're doing color, or very intricate work with lots of type changes
(or mixed font types, which the majority of professional imagesetter
will still advise against), it could be slow to print at best, or
you'll have to buy more memory in order for it to do very demanding
jobs, which might not make it a good investment.

I'd try it out first with some test documents, including design
intensive PDFs (they can be very huge files), and pages that mix PS
and TT fonts too to see how well it performs.

Marilyn

Brian Tokar said:

>I have a chance to acquire a used 2001-vintage HP laser printer at a good
>price.

Which model?

Just curious. What's a good price? You can get an excellent modern
laser printer from Brother that is Macintosh compatible for around $200
that will be superior to an old HP in just about every way. It will have
a smaller footprint, be faster, have finer toner, print at a higher
resolution, and have more features. Some Brother laser printers come with
a Postscript clone called BRScript, and some don't.

Check out:

The Brother HL-5240 (30PPM, 1200dpi, USB 2.0 [no Ethernet], Postscript
emulation):

Specifications:
<http://www.brother-usa.com/printer/printer_detail_AREA=PRINTER_1&PRODUCTID
=HL5240.aspx>

$179 from:
<http://www.provantage.com/buy-7brtl01v-hl-5240-laser-printer-brother-print
ers-shopping.htm>


Brother HL-5250DN
Similar to HL-5340, but includes:
Duplex Printing Standard
10/100 BaseT Ethernet

Specifications:
http://lookleap.com/brother-usa.com/a7

$221 from:
http://www.provantage.com/brother-hl-5250dn~7BRTL01W.htm

>It uses PostScript Level 2 emulation, as well as HP's PCL 6.
>
>Is that sufficient for most OS X applications, or is there any reason
>to insist on a printer that uses Postscript 3? (I assume it's at least
>as compatible as my current Laserwriter 16/600, but I'd like to be
>sure.)

The LaserWriter 16/600 is also a Postscript Level 2 printer.

Another thought. Which model of Macintosh are you using? The
LaserWriter 16/600 was a LocalTalk/EtherTalk printer. Are you using an
Ethernet connection, an Ethernet to LocalTalk adapter, or do you have a
very old Macintosh with LocalTalk? Does the HP laser printer that you
are looking at have a compatible connection?

Do you use any applications that require Postscript printing?

If all that you will be doing with your laser printer is printing word
processing documents, business graphics, spreadsheets, etc. you don't
need any sort of Postscript at all. In fact, even most Postscript
graphics programs print out nicely to a non-Postscript laser printer
these days.

Postscript of any level, or Postscript emulation, should be fine if all
that you are concerned about is using Postscript fonts and using programs
that print out using Postscript.

Emulation won't cut it if you need to send Postscript graphic jobs to a
service bureau and the final output needs to be identical to the proofs.
For this you want true Adobe Postscript.

Very few companies offer consumer level laser printers with true Adobe
Postscript anymore. Xerox offers a few, as does GCC.




Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

MACINTOSH OS X ROUTINE MAINTENANCE
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

Brian Tokar wrote:
> I have a chance to acquire a used 2001-vintage HP laser printer at a good
> price. It uses PostScript Level 2 emulation, as well as HP's PCL 6.
>
> Is that sufficient for most OS X applications, or is there any reason
> to insist on a printer that uses Postscript 3? (I assume it's at least
> as compatible as my current Laserwriter 16/600, but I'd like to be
> sure.)

It would be a lot easier to answer this question if you tell us the
model. HP has made 1000 or more models and variations of LaserJets as
best I can tell.

Also, how do you want to use it? Homework for the teens or printing
1000s of pages a week for the local non-profit? Text, graphics, etc...

We use an old workhorse - a HP LaserJet 4mp that I purchased used
back in 99. It works fine with InDesign and Quark on OSX and just
about anything else that's been thrown at it.

--
  Phil Emery
  creative director
  philfocusedcreative.com
          
  Focused Creative Communications
  Toronto, ON M6P 1T4 http://www.focusedcreative.com

On Aug 30, 2006, at 2:33 AM, Randy B. Singer wrote:

> Just curious. What's a good price? You can get an excellent modern
> laser printer from Brother that is Macintosh compatible for around $200
> that will be superior to an old HP in just about every way.

Many thanks for your helpful suggestions. They're asking $200 for the
old hp (2200dt) but I think I can bargain it down; it's also a duplex
printer, around 19 ppm.

> Another thought. Which model of Macintosh are you using? The
> LaserWriter 16/600 was a LocalTalk/EtherTalk printer. Are you using an
> Ethernet connection, an Ethernet to LocalTalk adapter, or do you have a
> very old Macintosh with LocalTalk? Does the HP laser printer that you
> are looking at have a compatible connection?

I'm using a Micro Asanteprint box to connect the serial port to an
Ethernet crossover cable that plugs into my old G4 tower. The HP
doesn't have Ethernet; I'd use the USB connector.
>
> Do you use any applications that require Postscript printing?

I occasionally do InDesign layouts, but nothing very complex, rarely
any color. I do occasionally use a service bureau, but one that's very
accommodating re: detail corrections.

At 16:42 08/29/06 -0700, Brian Tokar wrote:
>Is that sufficient for most OS X applications, or is there any reason
>to insist on a printer that uses Postscript 3?

Most applications don't know what language the printer speaks. The job of
the printer driver is to translate standard printing constructs into the
printer's language, whether that be PostScript, PCL, bitmap, or whatever.

There are exceptions, notably Adobe Illustrator (which actually saves its
documents in a subset of PostScript). But Illy should (not authoritative
here) be able to generate whatever level of PS is required, unless the
document itself requires PS3.

You can download the PostScript Language Reference Manual from
http://www.adobe.com/products/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf. Level 3 operators
are clearly marked, and there's a "LanguageLevel Feature Summary" chapter.
The new features in Level 3 pretty much fall into three categories:

1) If you don't already know you need it, then you don't need it.
2) Device control.
3) Shading patterns.

#1 should be self-explanatory.

#2 is for things like inserting preprinted sheets and other far more
specialized stuff -- a long list of device control parameters. If the
printer offers such a feature, then the manufacturer is going to take care
of the interface, and you don't care whether they do it by supplying full
PS3 or just extending their PS interpreter to handled the needed feature.
The only time you'd need to know how it gets to the printer is if you are,
for example, writing a program which generates PostScript directly, without
a driver, to send directly to a printer. (I've been doing exactly this
recently, which is why I'm up on this stuff -- and I still don't need any
of the device control stuff.)

#3 is the only one which might matter to a normal end user. "Shading
patterns" refers to gradients (gray or color) generated by the PS processor
(in other words in your situation, in the printer) rather than sent as an
image by the application. If you are doing graphics work and using an
application which can take advantage of this feature, then it might matter
to you.

But in general, as long as there's a printer driver that's compatible with
the current OS, you're in good shape. And since what printer "drivers" do
is mostly not direct device control (what the word "driver" used to mean)
but translating print API calls into the printer's internal language, they
tend to have fairly broad compatibility. They usually don't work in the
depths of the OS.

Nothing is ever truly guaranteed, but if I were buying a B&W printer which
otherwise had the capabilities I needed, I would not care about PS3. In
fact, I have a one-year-old HP laser printer which does PS2 -- there's just
no reason for HP to bother with PS3 for normal printers. Moreover, until I
bought that printer, I was still using a couple of PS1 printers. The only
time I had any resulting problems was occasionally when I'd download a PDF
that would print under PS2 but not under PS1. (PDF files contain embedded
PostScript commands.) You are unlikely to encounter any such problem with
PS2 vs PS3 because the new features in PS3 are so specialized that many
printers do not implement Level 3, and so inserting them into a publicly
distributed PDF would be pretty dumb.

Edward
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

On Aug 29, 2006, at 5:42 PM, Brian Tokar wrote:
> I have a chance to acquire a used 2001-vintage HP laser printer at
> a good
> price. It uses PostScript Level 2 emulation, as well as HP's PCL 6.
>
> Is that sufficient for most OS X applications, or is there any reason
> to insist on a printer that uses Postscript 3?

Level 2 is fine. Any program that creates PS3 output can "dumb it
down" to level 2 if that where it's headed. For most any device for
home/office use, Postscript Level 3 offers few, if any, functional
advantages over level 2.

--Nik

At 12:12 PM -0700 8/31/06, Alan Charlesworth wrote:

>>I have a chance to acquire a used 2001-vintage HP laser printer at a good
>>price. It uses PostScript Level 2 emulation, as well as HP's PCL 6.
>>
>>Is that sufficient for most OS X applications, or is there any reason
>>to insist on a printer that uses Postscript 3? (I assume it's at least
>>as compatible as my current Laserwriter 16/600, but I'd like to be
>>sure.)
>
>I have a HP postscript Laserjet 5M from 1997, and it is still going strong.

I got you all beat! Mine is the HP LaserJet 5MP which I bought in
1995 whilst working at Novell. I paid $500 for it and am stlll using
it. It has auto-switching AppleTalk/Centronics and I use a modern
USB-Centronics cable with 10.4. It still cranks out pages like the
day I bought it. 11 years and still going strong. I have never needed
PSL3.

HP is not the company it used to be nor are any other printer
manufacturers save for Canon.

The LaserJet 4/5/6 lines were built like tanks. I highly recommend them.

Mike

At 12:12 PM -0700 8/31/06, Brian Tokar wrote:
>Many thanks for your helpful suggestions. They're asking $200 for the
>old hp (2200dt) but I think I can bargain it down; it's also a duplex
>printer, around 19 ppm.

        Our HP LaserJet 2200dn sometimes (once ever few months) chokes on
complex PDFs (the astronomy dudes keep sending it articles with lots of
images). I think they now habitually run PDFs through a round of "pdf2ps"
or something like that to limit the issue.


--
* Johann Beda - contact link: <http://xri.net/=j-beda> *
* Johann's MostlyMac Computer Consulting - <http://mmcc.beda.ca/> *

On 31 Aug 2006, at 13:12 , Randy B. Singer wrote:
> Just curious. What's a good price? You can get an excellent modern
> laser printer from Brother that is Macintosh compatible for around
> $200
> that will be superior to an old HP in just about every way. It
> will have
> a smaller footprint, be faster, have finer toner, print at a higher
> resolution, and have more features. Some Brother laser printers
> come with
> a Postscript clone called BRScript, and some don't.

I bought a SAMSUNG ML-2010 which I bought for $80. It is not
postscript, but that hardly matters anymore. It's a 1200dpi printer
and it is very fast.

The only down side is that replacement toner carts cost about the
same as the printer.

--
There is NO Rule six!

Here's a data point - I answer customer service questions for Take Control Books, which are published as PDFs. Every now and again - perhaps once every 5 weeks, I get email from someone using an older HP laser printer who can't get the PDF to print at all.

In every case, we've been able to find some PDF-reading software that will print the PDF - usually the customer needs to update to a newer version, of Acrobat or Preview. Recently I've encountered a few cases where the user had to print from version 7.something of Adobe Reader - older versions of Adobe Reader/Acrobat didn't work and nor did Apple's Preview. In those recent cases, the problem occurred with a PDF from Macworld - Take Control is reselling the Macworld Superguide ebook series - and those PDFs are considerably more complex than the Take Control series.

cheers.... -Tonya Engst

On 8/31/06 at 12:12 PM, randymacattorney.com (Randy B. Singer) wrote:

> Brother HL-5250DN Similar to HL-5340, but includes: Duplex Printing
> Standard 10/100 BaseT Ethernet
>
> Specifications: http://lookleap.com/brother-usa.com/a7
>
> $221 from: http://www.provantage.com/brother-hl-5250dn~7BRTL01W.htm

We've got one of these in our office, replacing an Brother HL-1870N. It
has occasional problems with paper jams (as in maybe once a month), but
has otherwise done a pretty good job.

We've had several Brother printers over the last few years. As a general
rule, they haven't been as solidly built as the HP *laser* printers
we've had (for example, the manual feed paper tray feels flimsy and
takes a bit of extra care to close), and haven't lasted as long as HP
laser printers. However, as I told a friend when recommending the 5250DN
over an HP LaserJet 1320N, it's half the price; you could replace it
once and get about the same useful life as the HP for the same price,
and take advantage of improvements in printing technology at the same
time. I frankly hate the waste of just more-or-less throwing a printer
away - the reason we replaced the 1870N with a 5250DN was that it was
cheaper to replace it than repair it - but that's the way the printer
market has moved, at least on the low end (the 1870N cost around $750,
IIRC, so it's hard to argue that a 2/3 drop in price is a step backwards
- but the waste issue still gnaws at me).

> Do you use any applications that require Postscript printing?
>
> If all that you will be doing with your laser printer is printing
> word processing documents, business graphics, spreadsheets, etc. you
> don't need any sort of Postscript at all. In fact, even most
> Postscript graphics programs print out nicely to a non-Postscript
> laser printer these days.

I have to seriously disagree, for one reason: A networkable Postcript
(or Postscript-compatible) printer can be used with practically any
computer system, using the default OS drivers, without needing custom
drivers from the manufacturer. At most, it will print better with a
manufacturer-supplied PPD, but you don't *have* to have one to print
basic black and white - and you're unchained from dependence on the
manufacturer for driver support. After all the hassles I've had with
printer drivers over the years, from inkjets to weird orphans like the
Personal LaserWriter LS, that independence is priceless.

I have a HP LaserJet IIP, still working well. A humble advice: I got rid of paper jams by simply re-positioning the rubber bands inside the machine which take care of paper-feed. During the years they had become smooth, worn-out and slippery. Now I have no paper jams anymore.

Thanks,

Alan