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 Lines: 216 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1uiqg2$8sa@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: mwm@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us (Mike Meyer) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu 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 Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu