PowerBook Printing




For an excellent HyperCard stack (authored by Scott Logs dedicated to Mac printers from about 1996 and earlier), download MacPrinters here (@ 384K).
 
 

Have PowerBook. Can Print.

This page is more about printers than PowerBooks, but it will hopefully help with your portable printing as well. Note that I am not an expert on printer models (such is the diversity of printers produced for Macs over the years), so take my advice with a grain of salt - or not, as the case may be.

Laser printers vary considerably in terms of speed, features, memory and print quality. However, the beauty of the Mac - and the thing that made the Mac so successful originally - was its built in support for PostScript.

Apple LaserWriters (LWs) can be divided into two camps:

(i) QuickDraw

(ii) PostScript
 

(i) A QuickDraw printer uses the drawing and imaging routines built into the Mac to construct an image of the page or pages it's going to print. Naturally, the more complex the page (such as one containing a large number of fonts or complex or colourful graphics) is going to take longer than a one-page letter in Times 12. QuickDraw printer are sort of 'dumb' printers: they don't do the page image processing themselves: they rely on the Mac to do it for them. Consequently, the performance of the printer is heavily contingent upon the power, memory and speed of the Mac itself. Okay, that's not quite true: the Personal LW SC is a QuickDraw printer that does have its own processor and does its own work. But it's the rare exception rather than the rule.

QuickDraw printers also have other limitations. They cannot print PostScript graphics such as Bezier curves. They may have difficulty printing freehand drawings or paintings. Often their memory is limited (which means the image may refuse to print). All this means, essentially, that QuickDraw lasers are lower-end, home use printers which work fine as far as routine tasks are concerned. However, there are 3rd party Postscript interpreters that will translate PS into a language a QD printer will understand.

I'm not bagging QuickDraw (or non-PostScript) printers. Some of my best friends are QuickDraw laser printers. I've used a few and they can be great, low-priced lasers, usually offering much better economy, performance and print quality than inkjet printers. I've personally found three QuickDraw Apple LaserWriters, the Personal LaserWriter LS, the Personal LaserWriter SC and the Personal LaserWriter 300, offer excellent output and pretty fair speed (4-8 pages per minute - PPM; get used to PPM: it's important but can also be misleading). These LWs can be found for $US100 or less these days as they're 6-8 years old now. But as they have a life of 150,000-300,000 pages, you can be hopeful about pretty good service. And if they do blow up tomorrow, well, at least you only blew a hundred bucks or so instead of three.
 

(ii) PostScript

PostScript printers are a major step up from QuickDraw printers. Whereas there used to be a few PostScript-capable inkjets (like the HP DeskWriter 500 series), PostScript is more or less exclusively the province of Laser printers now (AFAIK). Some Windows and other such inferior printers (the HP 6L springs to mind here as an overpriced laser that's non-PostScript) use their own routines which fake PostScript or clone it to some extent so they can comprehend Type I (PostScript) fonts.  A piece of software called Freedom of Press will turn a non-PS document into PS code for example. But this is a compromise at best. I've had non-PS printers connected to various Macs (my PB mainly) and they've refused to print not-very-complex graphics such as 3D pie charts (or even 2D).

Anyway, the point is that Windows largely relies upon TrueType technology (this is why the professional desktop publishing and graphics market is virtually 100% Mac: it deals with PostScript and graphics so much better than Windows. Have you tried buying any QuarkXPress plug-ins for Windows lately?). TrueType was indeed developed by Apple as a rival to Adobe's (at the time) monopolistic position on PS and Type I font technology. So ithe world has Apple to thank for TrueType without which Windows wouldn't exist. But TrueType (TT) isn't quite as good as Type I; the main advantage of TT is scalable fonts and WYSIWYG fonts on screen at any size.

QuickDraw is responsible for TrueType so the Mac sends the size etc. of the fonts to the printer. This works great with QuickDraw printers. PS printers also understand TT. But PS fonts can look better than TT. More to the point, PS can print complex graphics and documents that you save as a PS file.

PS files are simply files you save to disk as .ps files rather than printing directly from the screen. They can take up a hell of a lot of megabytes, but nobody can mess around with them (almost). PS files can be placed on a Zip or Jaz and given to a service bureau for printing. So no one can or will change the formatting of that Illustrator, Photoshop or Quark document you've been killing yourself on. The PS file is simply sent to the printer or imagesetter and it comes out exactly how you formatted/designed it.

In my experience, very complex documents with lots of fonts or graphics (such as Acrobat .pdf files) are much more easily printed by sending them as .ps files to the printer, particularly with PS printers with relatively small amounts of memory (2-4MB). If you send the file to the printer conventionally, it may refuse to print (or print very slowly).

PostScript printers always have their own CPUs (a Motorola 68000, 68020 or 68030 in some Apple and HP laser printers) and, more recently, a RISC processor, often Intel or AMD (RISC CPUs of course inhabit Mac PowerPC PowerBooks - although the Motorola 603ev and G3 run much faster than the RISC processors in printers). A PostScript laser's CPU and RAM - essentially a complete computer inside - take over the image processing from the Mac (rasterizing or imaging fonts for example) and therefore they perform much better than a QuickDraw or non-PS laser. If the choice is between a new non-PS laser printer and an older PS Apple or HP laser, go for the latter. Newer lasers in my experience - the more compact ones like the HP 6L - don't compare with HP's earlier HP 4M or 5M or Apple's LaserWriter II or LW Pro series. These are large, heavy, solid printers made for heavy-duty office work. They can stand bashes and knocks and their consumables are cheap(ish). Newer lasers are smaller and lighter but they're more delicate and their printing life is much more limited. And what's the bet that when you need to print that PostScript graphic, you can't? Sure newer printers will do 600dpi or more, but if that's what you want, buy a cheaper inkjet. The older HPs and LWs will also do 8ppm compared with 4-5 (maximum; optimal conditions) for the new low-end lasers. For bigger jobs, 8ppm can mean a considerable time saving. I've sent 3,000 pages to my Apple LaserWriter IINTX (8ppm) in a single day and it didn't hiccup once (requiring only paper refills).
 

Serial and SCSI

QuickDraw printers are also not AppleTalk/LocalTalk printers. Don't want to confuse you here. All you need to know is there are two types of connection for the QuickDraw Apple LWs.

(i) Serial

(ii) SCSI

To use a serial connection, you simply plug in a standard Apple printer cable (Mini-DIN 8 male << >> Mini-DIN 8 male). Depending on your model of PowerBook (the earlier 100-series models have two ports: printer and modem; later PBs have only one combination printer/modem port; the current (and future) G3/G4 PowerBooks have no serial port at all!), you can connect it to either the printer or modem port. The Mac doesn't care. But if you have both ports, use the printer port for the sake of convenience.

A SCSI QuickDraw printer uses your PowerBook's (or desktop's!) SCSI port to get its message through. Not popular so probably not that many around. You could of course daisy-chain other SCSI peripherals to the printer. SCSI-interface Apple LW models included the LaserWriter IISC and the Personal LaserWriter SC ('SC' stands for SCSI in case you haven't worked it out yet).

Serial Apple printers include the entire StyleWriter series, together with the HP DeskWriter and the (Apple compatible) DeskJets. The DeskWriter is a bit of an interesting one as it has both serial and AppleTalk capability. You could even get a PostScript cartridge for it! (rare). StyleWriters can also get an optional Ethernet cartridge which enables you to put the StyleWriter on an ethernet network. These cartridges were extremely expensive but you should be able to pick them up cheaply now that the StyleWriters are no longer produced.
 
 

What Apple printers work with which PowerBooks?

1. Laser Printers

All Apple LaserWriters from the original LaserWriter to the 8500 work with every PowerBook ever built. However, not all of Apple's LW drivers work with all PBs. Let's take a look at the various drivers and what they offer:
 
 

All of the above are free downloads from Apple and Adobe.
 

What printers work with the PowerBook 100?

First, all the ImageWriters work with the 100 (that's the ImageWriter, ImageWriter II and ImageWriter LQ).

StyleWriters - there's less choice here. The original StyleWriter and the StyleWriter II work. You can even use the StyleWriter 1200 driver for grayscale options (the earlier StyleWriter driver doesn't support this on a 68000).

An alternative here is HP's DeskWriter 500. Even the latest driver (available at <www.hp.com>) works on 68000 Macs. I've verified this. Some people have reported that later DeskJets will work with the DeskWriter driver but I've not verified this. You can send comments if you've tried this combo here

All PostScript laser printers, more or less regardless of brand, provided they have an LocalTalk connection, will work with all PBs (of course, if you have ethernet, you can link to any ethernet equipped printer). The QD lasers will work as well, although the 'dumb' QD printers, such as the Personal LW LS will be slower as they lack their own CPU, unlike the LW IISC which has its own 68000 processor. The bottom line is that more complex documents (.pdf files and web pages, for example) may print very s-l-o-w-l-y on a QD printer and may not even print at all as the Mac and the printer combined may have insufficient memory to produce an image of the page sent to the printer.
 
 

What about portable printers?

For Lombard owners and those with PC cards which support USB connections, a wider range of portable PC printers are becoming available as USB slowly but surely takes over from parallel in the Windoze world (thanks principally to the iMac and now the G3 desktops and PowerBooks). But for older PBs, there're a couple of choices:

Apple Colour StyleWriter 2200: No longer made, but a good, light portable printer that does 5ppm, has a separate colour cartridge and works with any PB from the 140 onward (also with your LC or Mac II if you have one). Its paper feeder holds only 50 pages and the ink cartridges do not print many colour pages (ink density per page will obviously vary wildly so it's difficult to say how many pages they'll do. You can install just a black cartridge if you just need to print text (faxes, email etc.). Colour carts are expensive, so think about ink refills which're much cheaper. It's a good printer for the road and the power supply's not too bulky.

Hewlett-Packard DeskWriter 310 and 320: Again, no longer in production, but HP's first attempt at a portable printer for the Mac. It's battery powered, weighs less than 5lbs, prints 3 colours up to 600x300dpi and is probably pretty cheap by now.

Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 340: This is the more recent entry by HP into the Mac portable printer market. Available in a cool black case, the 340 is ultralight and ultraportable (read: slim and small). It prints colour and it is a trouble-free printer in my experience.
 

Earlier Apple inkjets like the original StyleWriter and the StyleWriter II are small and can function without their papr feeders. They'd fit into a briefcase, but the StyleWriter I in particular is slow. For a cheap, occasional printing solution, these might be the go. They should be very inexpensive by now and although their cartridges are ridiculously high-priced considering it's such old tech, you can refill the old ones 3 or 4 times with printer ink bottles and a syringe. These refills are available everywhere and it works out to be very cheap (in Australia $47 for a cartridge, versus about $1 per refill).

You can even use the latest and most advanced driver (the Colour StyleWriter 1500 driver) with the StyleWriter I, II and 1200 (and the CSW 1500 of course). You can use the 1200 driver with the  PowerBook 100, but the 1500 driver requires a PowerBook 140 or later.
 

What if my PowerBook has only one printer/modem port?

This is a nuisance, but that's the way it is. As modems and PC card slots became more or less standard (the PowerBook 500 series and the entire  PowerBook Duo and  Duo 2300 series ), Apple removed the dual serial ports they had built into the PowerBook 100 series (except the PB100).

This introduces a problem: if you have no external modem and you're connected by the LocalTalk/AppleTalk port to a printer or network, what do you do? Of course, internal modems and PC cards were meant to solve this problem. That meant you didn't have to keep swapping modems and printers. But I'm one person who does use an external modem. This doesn't bother me especially. But if you're using an AppleTalk printer (a PostScript laser printer for example), you have to close AppleTalk in the Chooser, otherwise you'll get a 'Serial port busy' or similar error when you try to dial up or use a fax modem.

OK. You've shut off AppleTalk. You're *still* getting that error? What do you do? Well, you can restart, but that's too time consuming, and anyway you've got open documents. Here's the trick:

Put the PowerBook to sleep for a few seconds. Wake it up. Then try and connect. Presto! It works. The serial port (i.e. AppleTalk) has been closed properly.
 

What's PowerPrint?

PowerPrint can be a very effective solution for road warriors. You might not know what printers you'll encounter jetting 'round the globe. PowerPrint is designed to be the answer to this problem.

PowerPrint provides drivers compatible with literally hundreds of Windows-only printers - both inkjets and lasers - so Mac users can simply plug and play. PowerPrint comes with a special cable with a LocalTalk mini-DIN 8 (i.e. a standard Mac connector) at one end and a standard parallel printer connection at the other. Virtually all PC printers should then work with a Mac.

Like all solutions such as this, there are compromises. Documents will print more slowly. And all the options available in the printer may not be available within given applications. The generic drivers often put a cap on this. Nevertheless, all you need to do is have PowerPrint installed and carry the cable with you. For emergency print jobs and universal connectivity, PowerPrint has no rival in the marketplace. PowerPrint receives frequent updates to accommodate new printer models.
 

Useful Laser Printer Software
 

All of this software is freely downloadable from Apple and HP or from Info-Mac.
 

What's your pick?

I'm kinda partial to the Apple LaserWriter II series.Not very portable (about 28kg!) but they give burglars a chronic hernia so no one picks them up and removes them from your property (unless they have at least a 4 hour head start on you, as you sure as hell won't run fast with this baby). I own a IINTX and a IIg so they're the printers I know really well (having disassembled them a few times). Yes, they're old, but they're built like bricks, survive earthquakes and are cheap to maintain with a minimum life of 300,000 copies. Many have done far less (I recently [1999] picked up a IIg with only 9,000 copies on it!).

The beauty of the LW II series (SC, NT, NTX, f and g) is that their parts are entirely interchangeable. All you need to do is swap the logic board (remove two screws and that's it) and you have a completely different LaserWriter. Yes, they're old (some date from 1988) but fuser assemblies, the only part that ever really goes, are relatively cheap in the US at least ($35). Toner - esp. recycled toner cartridges - are also inexpensive. The IIf and IIg can fake 600dpi although the rest do 300dpi. The IIf /g also do up to 64 levels of gray.

If you find a good condition LW IISCS (that's the oddball SCSI one), buy it and look for a better logic board. The IINTX/f/g also have SCSI ports but these are for connecting external hard disks. Neat, hey? But all Apple printers have their good points and for a (relatively) recent guide, download the HyperCard stack here (384K).

This is only a very brief guide to PowerBook printing. I'll add to it as time permits. Meanwhile, it has hopefully helped you think about the type of printer you want to buy.
 
 

Em@il

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