08/1997
Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet
From: mwm@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us (Mike Meyer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Super_DJC2 printer driver for HP DeskJet
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Date: 2 Jun 1993 18:11:14 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
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Reply-To: mwm@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us (Mike Meyer)
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Keywords: printing, printer driver, HP DeskJet, commercial
PRODUCT NAME
Super_DJC2
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
Super_DJC2 ("DJC2") is a printer driver for the HP DeskJet printer
series, including the 550C.
COMPANY INFORMATION
Name: CREATIVE FOCUS
Address: Box 580
Chenango Bridge
New York, NY 13745-0580
USA
Telephone: (607) 648-4082
Email: ghull@bix.com
LIST PRICE
$50.00 (US). The places I shop do not discount it much.
SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
HARDWARE
You can use DJC2 without a DeskJet printer, but it's much
more useful with one.
SOFTWARE
None listed, but the manual talks as if 1.3 were the only
AmigaDOS version before 2.0.
COPY PROTECTION
None. You must install the driver on your system disk to use it. It
comes with a philosophical treatise about piracy and copy protection, though.
MACHINE USED FOR TESTING
I tested the program on an Amiga 3000 with 2 meg of Chip RAM
and 16 meg of Fast RAM, under AmigaDOS 3.
REVIEW
DJC2 claims to be a preferences printer driver for the HP DeskJet
line of printers, designed to support all of them. It uses the preferences
printer settings to provide control over many features of this printer line,
and uses the Expanded Command Set for accessing many of the remaining
features.
The graphics capabilities are the best feature of this driver. From
the manual: "By means of advanced dithering technics, Super_DJC2 can produce
high quality graphics output both for grayscale and color images." My
experiments show this to be the truth, not just hype.
To take advantage of that capability, you need to tailor the
PrinterGFX preferences settings for the document in question. You control
color correction with the Threshold setting, including settings for none and
settings that match the earlier Super_DJC and Super_DJ printer drivers. The
same setting also controls how much shingling the printer does. High
shingling levels cause the printer to print every Nth dot in each pass over
a line, taking N lines to print. This takes longer, but cuts down on
bleeding between the dots. If you have a 500c, which doesn't have black ink
when printing color, the Density setting controls printing black graphics in
color mode. Finally, the Letter/Draft setting controls depletion, which
uses less ink for dark areas. This can improve some images that would
otherwise have large areas with three colors on them.
As you can see, getting all of these settings correct could be a
problem. Getting them all right produces the best output. DJC2 lets you to
control them relatively easily, which is one of the things that makes it
such a good graphics printer driver.
The text features are, if anything, more numerous. Besides the
AmigaDOS printer capabilities of changing font pitches and line spacing, the
color of the text, and similar things, DJC2 allows you to change between
printer fonts on the fly, and even to download and access soft fonts for the
printers. You can use the printer preferences to choose between various
internal fonts, including access to landscape mode.
The driver includes a feature that suppresses spurious page feeds if
the paper type is Continuous (FanFold in 1.3). While this is useful, it
sometimes leaves the printer with a page in printing position when the
application believes it has finished. Hitting the Eject button on the
printer finishes the print and ejects the page; you can disable the feature
from preferences if it's annoying. However, turning off this feature leaves
the printer in perforation skip, which causes some programs to leave 1/2
inch less top margin than you expect.
BUGS
There is a major bug -- or set of bugs -- in the text features of
the printer driver. The text driver doesn't behave like an AmigaDOS
preferences printer. The most obvious problem is that it doesn't do any
character mapping -- you get whatever graphics the printer wants to print
for the ASCII codes you sent it, not the ECMA-94 Latin 1 graphics the Amiga
uses, and that other printer drivers provide. The suggested work-around is
to set the printer to use the ECMA-94 Latin 1 internal font, but this
doesn't work with all programs -- Thinker being a good example.
The other problem is that it doesn't appear to reset properly;
instead it resets to the default state for the hardware. This may be the
reason that the work-around doesn't work in all cases. It also means that
you can't depend on the printer to be what preferences describes after
resetting the printer. For instance, you use sys:tools/initprinter to get
the printer into landscape mode after setting preferences so that DJC2
prints envelopes. To get it out of landscape mode, you send the printer a
reset command. Neither procedure works in both places.
When I talked to the author about these problems, he called them
features, and said that you had to break the standard to be better than the
standard. This is clearly untrue -- DJC2 itself provides better features
than the standard in many places, and does so in a manner that complies with
the standard. The two differences noted here are particularly painful, as
they could be easily available through SuperDJC2 without breaking software
that expects drivers to follow the standards.
DOCUMENTATION
The documentation is a 30 page manual on disk. The document was
been "printed" through DJC2 and the results captured on disk. Since
this file has DeskJet printer command sprinkled throughout, it is not
very useful until you send it to the printer through the PAR: or PRT:
devices. I suspect this is a form of copy protection.
The manual is a reference manual for graphics and text features and
how to access them. It includes recommended preferences settings for
different types of output and for different applications, which is critical
for a printer driver this complex. Other useful sections include the
troubleshooting guide, the tutorial for getting the most out of the driver,
and the section on differences between Super_DJC and Super_DJC2.
Unfortunately, there is no index.
LIKES AND DISLIKES
Using the standard preferences interface for setting features is a
major benefit. This makes the user interface "Amiga-like", by definition.
It also allows scripts to change printer settings with the CLI interface to
the printer preferences.
The differences from the CBM standard for printers are enough to
make me return the program. I can't use it for most of my text-only
applications, because the software expects drivers to follow the standard.
COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS
DJC2 provides more features and flexibility than similar products
that I've used. Many of them are even accessible in a semi-standard way.
However, it will at odd and unexpected moments produce garbage, because it's
not doing what the driver software expected.
VENDOR SUPPORT
When I talked to the author on the phone, he implied that the
problems I experienced were the fault of other vendor's software. He
reiterated the claims in the manual that they wanted to fix problems, but
the impression I got was that this was more lip service than anything else.
On a second call to attempt to solve the problems, I found the
technical support to be insulting and argumentative. They as much as said
that they had more important things to do than deal with customer problems,
and called the timely response I've gotten from other companies special
treatment. An exchange of letters produced no better results. I consider
this attitude unacceptable, and returned the printer driver.
WARRANTY
The warranty is part of the "Un-Lawyer-Like Preamble" to the
manual. It says that DJC2 behaves as described in the manual, and you can't
recover more in damages than you paid for it. There is no time limit, no
mention of correcting bugs, and no mention of what happens if you sell the
software to someone else.
CONCLUSIONS
This product is uneven. It does what it does very well; it's just
that what it doesn't jibe with what it claims to be. If you want a
high-quality, low-cost color graphics printer and can live with an
unsupported commercial product, then this driver and an HP550C might be
acceptable. If you want extensive character capabilities and are willing to
embed printer commands in your document by hand, this doesn't make you much
better off than using a DeskJet without benefit of a printer driver. If you
want a quality AmigaDOS printer driver for use with a DeskJet, this isn't it.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Copyright 1993 Mike W. Meyer.
All rights reserved.
---
Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews
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