Test reports

Test reports

1. Progress report Turboprint 7.02 with Ghostscript 4.03 (by Uwe Mann)

Who wants to get printing results with the Amiga needs an additional program like Turboprint or Studio.

Basically it works also with the Workbench printer drivers, but who really wants to get the last bit of his printer, needs Turboprint.

I use the full version of Turboprint 7.02 with Ghostscript 4.03.

I use an HP 670C and this printer is supported fine from Turboprint.

But you have to consider, that Turboprint is NO original printer driver. Most of the printer drivers are originally for Windows-PCs only. But Turboprint supports nearly any printer connected to the Amiga. So it doesn't (nearly) matter, which Amiga you use.

Turboprint 7.02 is shipped with 2 detailled manuals, but I miss the minimum requirements in the manual.

If you want to have fun with printing you should use at least a 68030 and Fast-RAM (min. of 8 MB) and at least a hard disk with at least 10 MB of free disk space for spooling.

Basically it works also with an unaccelerated A500 and OS 2.1, but I said, if you want to have fun...

I own an A1200, OS 3.0 with Blizzard IV with 16 MB of Fast-RAM and a 420 MB Seagate

and an A4000/030, OS 3.0 with Blizzard 4030 (030 processor with Copro 50 MHz), 16 MB of Fast-RAM and Merlin graphics board with P96 software and Quantum Fireball 1.2 GB. I upgraded the A4000 to a 68040/25 processor board. (The gain of speed is enormously high!)

With an 040 processor Turboprint is fun.

Just enter the disk and install, you are asked for your printer Turboprint should install its driver, that ONLY works with Turboprint.

On the second disk you find the Postscript interpreter Ghostscript 4.03, that can also be installed, but that's not absolutely necessary.

Turboprint can put two start icons for Turboprint and Turbospool into the WBStartup drawer, so both programs run in the background and they catch ANY print job.

After the installation and new booting just set the preferences for the printer using Turboprefs.

Very important!

The type of paper:
I found out, that it depends very much on the paper you want to print on.

If you want to print something special, you should eventually the recommendations of the printer manufacturer.

For normal print paper the settings

I also the it to 50 % ink reduction, that's fine for the most prints.

But you should consider, that the highest resolution, that mosts printers offer, is only for the special (expensive) printer paper.

There are different opinions regarding Turbospool as I heard on the Amiga meeting in Hannover on April 10, 1999.

The Amiga users I asked and who own a 060 processor didn't like Turbospool very much.

I like Turbospool, so the print data a sent to the printer all in one.

Else my printer stutters, because the data are not available fast enough.

But you should set Turbospool on an Amiga with less than a 040 that way, that the print job is stopped previously and not directly sent to the printer.

Only a 040-Amiga or above is able to store the print job in the spooler to send it automatically to the printer, then.

That works with the "smaller" Amigas, too, but if you want to print larger things (colour pictures, DTP, etc.) it can happen, that the data, that are in the printer spooler are sent to the printer, even if the program that sent the print job hasn't finished and some time the point is reached, when the rest of the data have been processed by the printer and the rest of the data flow just "drop-for-drop", so the printer "stutters" and keeps cleaning its ink jet.

A HP 670C is equipped with 0.5 MB printer memory and those want to be filled...

More problems with Turbospool:

I had problems with the file system PFS2 4.2, because Turbospool meant, that Turboprint had to be started first...

If you have a graphics board with Picasso96 software other special problems may occur.

I wanted to print a page with Wordworth 6, that has various coloured fonts and a coloured clipart. This led to a nice crash as Turbospool began to work. This didn't occur with the demo of Final Writer 97.

Don't use a printer spooler, switch to an Amiga mode or copy FastIprefs into the C: directory and rename IPrefs in the Startup-Sequence to FastIPrefs.

The GraphicsPublisher offers a lot off possibilities to load pictures of any common format, to edit them and to print them out.

But the GraphicsPublisher can do more:

On the Aminet 19 is a picture of Earth, that is larger than 8 MB... With the GraphicsPublisher you can load it without problems, watch it and print it out (of course, this needs a while).

I don't know any program (for this price), that can use pictures of this size, much less thän to print them.

Another possibility: You can edit (e.g. scanned) pictures with Photooptimize and get a high quality print as a result.

I created e.g. a wedding paper with text and scanned colour and grayscale pictures.

To make high quality prints with special paper isn't hard, but it is more difficult to get acceptable results with paper of lower quality.

The built-in text editor is a bit primitive and you should create the texts with a texteditor previously, save them in ASCII format and use the built-in text editor of the graphicsPublisher just for placing the text and for selection of the font.

I also tried to print the text with WW6, to place the picture nearly milimetre exact with the graphicsPublisher (nearly becuase the printer doesn't fetch the paper 100 % exact).

Ghostscript 4.03

Thostscript is an interpreter, that converts Postscript into graphics. Wordworth, FinalWriter and other good DTP programs are able to print in Postscript mode.

You can print the result or display it on the screen. Saved postscript files can also be shown with e.g. DirectoryOpus, if the desired command is given to Ghostscript.

Now I print Texts with WW6 and Ghostscript. As a result the printing is accelerated enormously.

I noticed, that WW6 and Ghostscript cannot print colour pictures. I always get high quality grayscale pictures. And that, even if the characters could be printed in colour.

The original was Aladdin Ghostscript 5.10. But this version must not shipped with commercial software. But a special version can be downloaded from the homepage of Irseesoft.

Aladdin Ghostscript 5.10 from the Aminet doesn't work with Turboprint. When printing with both versions I couldn't find a difference in the result.

But I'd wish a graphical user interface for Ghostscript.

And here a small tip, that is quite old:

If you have to make returning prins and these haven't to be changed, just change TurboPrefs that way, that the print data are "printed" into a file.

If you copy this printed file e.g. with OPUS to PAR: everthing is printed, WITHOUT the need of a text program or TurboPrint!

What I don't like, either: If I want to print an ASCII text and Turboprint runs in the background, the printer is quite slower than necessary.

These are just some parts of Turboprints abilities - you could write books about them.

Uwe Mann <Uwe.Mann@t-online.de>«