HP has a problem with hints when printing that I wish I knew about before I bought my HP ( not the same model). I get around it by testing minus hints and then add the hints. Which in reality is the way type making works in general. Still, it’s a stupid bug and I wish they would solve it.

I have a lot of empathy for you position in looking. There is no obvious good answer that I can see unless you want to shell out very heavily for a Xante. But even then you might want a POS printer to see what the worst might be like... You can console yourself with the knowledge that there is no one right proofing choice for you. No silver bullet - except to be aware of what you are aiming for and what methods you want it to work well in and find a way to have it tested there. So if it is fine offset - make pals with a printer and see if you can run stuff in the margins - and so on.

There are several threads on Typophile that address similar questions and in many ways what I have written here is a nutshell summary of them along with a little salt of my own. Still, I encourage you to dig them up via a google site specific search and see what was said and by whom.

Hmmm… I might just keep having proofs done on the big Xante printers at the local print shop until I move somewhere that I have room for a Xante machine. I really wish that the 4G came in an 8.5”x11” model…

Anyone have any opinions about this laser printer? I need one for general office use.

http://www.costcentral.com/proddetail/Ricoh_Aficio_CL3500N/402434/J36392...

Sharon: pretty negative review of that model’s text quality from PC World. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127557-page,1-c,printers/article.html

Some of the criticisms are surprising, as they would imply problems with interpreting the font hints (like most HP models); yet the Ricoh uses actual Adobe PostScript 3.

Regards,

T

Thanks, Thomas. I didn’t see that. They recommend the BrotherHL-4040cnwhich isn’t a postscript printer.

Sharon

With everything I’m reading about how bad anything new printers under $2500 are at text rendering I’m thinking about buying an older printer and just running it off the parallel port on my PC. Although I guess I could just get a job and buy a Xante.

You have much more stringent needs than I do, James. I apologize for piggybacking on your thread but it seemed to have gotten quiet. (That made sense to me, anyway.):-)

Sharon

No need to apologize Sharon, your question was entirely relevant.

Has anyone used Xerox’s newer Phaser line printers? I remember having one in an office about seven years ago, but given some of the problems I’ve had recently with much more expensive Xerox lasers I’m not sure I want to mess around with the inexpensive models.

I have a Phaser 7300DN at home, which has been rock-solid, but then again I don’t do the mega-volume it’s designed for. I know some folks with less expensive Phaser models who are very happy with them. They have Adobe PostScript, if that matters to you.

(With the light/occasional usage I have, the Phaser solid-ink models don’t make sense, but the LED or laser models are good.)

Regards,

T

Thanks, Thomas. I’m just looking for something to use for Postscript printing of my fonts because my Winprinter can get pretty gross.

Deleted my post because I changed my mind. :-)

Sharon

I’ve used a couple of Laserjet 1200 TNs, one at school, one at home and one at work. Good machines, 1200 dpi, reasonably fast, and absolutely indestructible. I have no idea how many pages these printers have burned through, but they’ll run without any service for years and years.

– Andreas Krautwald

I have been using my “hp Laserjet 1200 series” printer for years, and all the thousands of pages of font specimen PDF files from my website produced flawless printouts on this model of HP printer. However, I usually make printouts in PCL mode, and I use PS mode only for rare debugging purposes and for dumps of raw PS files.
(e.g. the file www.sanskritweb.net/fontdocs/ag1992ps.zip of all Akzidenz Grotesk fonts would be such a raw PS file which could be dumped in PS mode on the HP 1200 printer and could be used as a quality test for the PS mode of this printer model).

Is there really much of a difference between printing fonts to a Postscript printer as opposed to a PCL printer? Or is Postscript more important when comping complex projects that might get mucked up by a PCL printer?

> Is there really much of a difference ...

On my bookshelf, luckily, I still have HP’s 1990 voluminous PCL Technical Reference Manual, which is bigger than Adobe’s two 1987 PS manuals (Reference + Tutorial), and this makes it clear that PCL is at least as complex as PS. However, when PS is transformed to PCL, mathematical rounding errors are unavoidable, but the same also happens, when you embed TT fonts into a PDF and make a printout on a PS printer, so it is difficult to avoid such rounding errors. (HP’s original PCL used Compugraphic’s font format.)

The one-volume 1990 PCL Manual is downloadable here, split into two PDF files:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/bpl13210/bpl1321...

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/bpl13211/bpl1321...

A funny remark for historians: In the above PDF, HP states “First edition - October 1992”, while in printed original on my bookshelf, HP stated “First Edition - September 1990”. That’s how historians distort history.

However, when PS is transformed to PCL, mathematical rounding errors are unavoidable, but the same also happens, when you embed TT fonts into a PDF and make a printout on a PS printer, so it is difficult to avoid such rounding errors.

I don’t know about the first half of this statement, as I don’t deal much with PCL, but the second half of this statement is untrue.

Since some time around 1993-94, all new PostScript devices have included a native TrueType rasterizer. So, when embedding a TrueType font in a PDF, as long as it is embedded as TrueType, it can indeed print to a PostScript device without having undergone any transformations whatsoever. There are no more “rounding errors” than there would be using any other printing approach at the same resolution.

Regards,

T

This is a tough decision to make on a budget. I just bought an Epson 3800 so I can’t spend too much on this. What does it mean when it says it has BR-Script3 for postscript on a Brother printer. I’m looking at the Brother HL-4070cdw Color Laser Printer.

This is from Brother: If you are printing graphics, photos, special fonts and charts, or if you are a Mac user, consider a printer with PostScript®
emulation. Many Brother laser printers come standard with
BR-Script3 (PostScript®3™) emulation.

Is this okay?

Sharon

> but the second half of this statement is untrue

As regards the HP 1200, it is not untrue.

For instance, the test file

http://www.sanskritweb.de/temporary/o.pdf

contains Arial’s degree sign (°) embedded as TTF font

as seen in Acrobat’s menue “Document Properties: Fonts”.

If this PDF is printed to a HP 1200 printer in PS mode, the PS file sent to the printer contains the outlines of the following degree sign:

http://www.sanskritweb.de/temporary/o-ps.jpg

while Arial’s degree sign has the following outlines:

http://www.sanskritweb.de/temporary/o-tt.jpg

So, the second half of the statement is not untrue:
The “rounding errors” are very much noticeable.

We have abandoned the idea of a color laser. Too expensive to get a good one and a cheap one seems like a bad idea. I’m waiting to see if James finds a good monochrome that isn’t too expensive.

Right now my plan is to watch Craigslist and get something when an office upgrades or goes under. At $300 this one is tempting, but I really don’t know where I’d put it. 1200 square feet is just not enough for two people and two dogs!

$300? That ad said over $1900.

There’s one on Craigslist DC for $300. Some office in Virginia is dumping one cheap (happens all the time around here, businesses are always downsizing and going bankrupt).

This morning I recalled that, three years ago, I uploaded special PDF and PS test files for the HP 1200 printer for testing the PS mode of this and of other laser printers:

http://www.sanskritweb.net/fontdocs/#LASER

Sorry if this is going off on a tangent, but Eben and Thomas talk about problems with hints when printing; this confused me a little, as I thought hints were for screen only. Can anyone provide a little more info?

Someone who knows the technical process can correct me, but the basic idea is that the hints operate all the time, but only make a noticeable difference at low resolution. So there is often not much effect in printing. However with small sizes, the details of the joins and serifs can be affected, as only a small number of dots may be involved. So if you are proofing a text type, most laster printers will mislead you as to how photo offset printing will render the outlines. There are other issues, such as whether the outlines are rendered too thick or thin, etc.

Interesting... thanks.

going off on another tangent, I read the following via the sanksrit website:
“If you do not belong to the idiots who buy Adobe forgeries, you will spot the words typeset in the forged font.”

idiots? and forgeries? a little heavy handed I’d say...

As far as Xante 4G goes. I’d warn people to say away from them. We got one for work and it’s been nothing but problems. Apparently there’s been a number of complaints about it. We have a 3G that works great… most of the time. We also have a Phaser 7760N, and it prints a bit on the dark side for colour proofs, but it’s crisp if not a bit slow to rip files.

I have a Xante 4G and 3G and I have no problems. And for proofing type the 2400 dpi output is nice to look at.

Never use third party toner with Xante. That may be the cause of the above stated problems.