Apple’s color disk contains two extensions to Macintosh system software that greatly enhance your ability to work with color and/or gray-scale images.
• 32-Bit QuickDraw enhances color support for Macintosh II and SE/30 computers by breaking the 256-color barrier. With 16-bit or 32-bit video cards, you can display the full range of visible color. Even if your Macintosh II or SE/30 is equipped with an 8-bit video card, you will be able to manipulate and view data with more than 256 colors. In addition, 32-Bit QuickDraw provides better support for gray scale image processing.
• LaserWriter 6.0 is intended to support color PostScript printers. It also supports halftone printing of gray-scale images and halftone printing of color images on monochrome PostScript printers such as Apple LaserWriter printers.
Make sure that you have system software version 6.0.3 (or a later version) in the System Folder on your startup disk. (To verify the version number, select the System file and choose Get Info from the File menu. You’ll find the version number in the information window that appears.)
Insert Apple’s color disk and open the disk icon. Open the 32-Bit QuickDraw folder where you’ll find the 32-Bit QuickDraw icon and icons for the General and Monitors control panels. (Because of the added number of colors thanks to 32-Bit QuickDraw, Apple needed to update these two control panel devices.)
If you intend to take advantage of the features of 32-Bit QuickDraw, drag all three of these icons to the System Folder on your startup disk. If your System Folder already contains earlier versions of the General and Monitors control panel devices, an alert message appears asking whether you want to replace items with the same name. Click OK.
The new version of the Monitors control panel is similar to the original version.
The most notable differences between this and the previous version of the Monitors control panel are the Identify and Options buttons.
• If you have more than one monitor, and want to determine which monitor is which, click Identify and hold down the mouse button. On each monitor’s screen you’ll see a number corresponding to its related icon.
• To learn specifically what kind of video card the selected monitor is connected to, click Options. This brings up a small dialog box where you see the brand name of the video card. Click OK or Cancel to close this dialog box.
The other features of this control panel operate the same as before.
The newest printer resources offer advantages to anyone using 32-Bit QuickDraw. In addition, LaserWriter 6.0 provides benefits for anyone with a color Macintosh. The 6.0 versions of LaserWriter and Laser Prep allow color or gray-scale printing on a color PostScript printer. And even if you don’t have a color printer, the new printer driver enables you to print color or gray-scale images as halftones.
Installation is simple. First, restart your Macintosh and wait until you see the desktop. Insert Apple’s color disk, open the disk icon, and open the LaserWriter 6.0 folder. Select all three icons (LaserWriter, Laser Prep, and PrintMonitor) and drag them to your System Folder. If you see an alert asking whether to replace items with the same name, click OK. When the copying is finished, open the Chooser to select a printer.
WARNING: If you are on a network and share use of a printer with others, make sure that everyone on the network installs all three files from the LaserWriter 6.0 folder. If some users have installed LaserWriter version 6.0 while others are still using version 5.2, printers will reinitialize frequently. To avoid this problem, make sure all the Macintosh computers on the network use the same version of the printer driver.
Once you have installed the new LaserWriter driver, there are some new features.
The Print dialog box has two new buttons:
• “Color/Grayscale” (the default) allows color output on a color PostScript printer and halftone output on a monochrome PostScript printer.
• “Black & White” gives you printer output that’s the same as what you get from the 5.2 LaserWriter driver. Some applications may have trouble printing in color/gray scale. If you have such problems, select the Black & White button. In addition, when you select Black & White, bitmap printing may be faster.
There are also some changes in the Page Setup dialog box:
• The dialog box now includes the No. 10 envelope in its pop-up menu of additional page sizes. Select it when you want to print in an envelope-sized area, and be prepared to center feed the envelope into the printer. (The manual feed guide or envelope tray for the LaserWriter IINT and NTX are designed to let you feed envelopes this way.)
• If you have a non-Apple printer whose printable area is different from that of the LaserWriter, contact the printer manufacturer for a custom version of the LaserWriter 6.0 driver with appropriate page sizes.
• If you receive a document that was formatted for a special page size not supported in the LaserWriter 6.0 driver, it may print improperly. You must choose Page Setup from the File menu, select the appropriate page size for your printer, and click OK. The document will then print correctly.
• The “Invert Image” option does not work when you are printing color documents.
The default memory allotted to the PrintMonitor application is 72K. If you have problems printing complex color or gray-scale images, the memory size may be the cause. To increase the memory, select the PrintMonitor icon and choose the Get Info command. Then select the box labeled Application Memory Size and increase the memory allotted to PrintMonitor. The next time you print, the PrintMonitor application will take advantage of the extra memory.
Also included on this disk is a PICT file called “Bruce and Pals.” You can use PICTViewer (which you’ll find on the accompanying demo disk) to view this file.
