I can remember reading in an old TRS-80 magazine years ago that bubble technology for printers would someday sweep the land. Well it has pretty much happened. Bubble, or inkjet printers are here and in full force. It's amazing once you realize that technicians have figured out how to get a machine to literally spraypaint ink in such minute and exact quantities to form letters at 300 dpi or better. People who don't want to dish out the cash for a laser printer can now have the same output at a much reduced cost..or can they?
Laser quality output?
Inkjet printers do truly produce output that is at the resolution of laser printers but because the drying time needed the ink does bleed slightly in th paper (a lot if you use really porous paper) and the output doesn't quite live up to a laserprinter. But, alas if you look at the price difference you may not notice any print difference.
Most inkjets are able to work with the different font types successfully. With the advent of Truetype fonts and the Adobe fonts (with ATM, Adobe Type Manager) the possibilities are many and painless.
Graphics
In the printer world there are basically two types of formats. Quickdraw and Postcript. The short story on their differences are: Quickdraw lets the computer use it's processor to build the fonts or graphics. PostScript has built in cues that instruct the computer what to place on the screen. For this reason Quickdraw usually takes longer to process a printed page.
Inkjet printers can't handle Postcript directions. For this reason postrcipt graphics will sometimes not print or print very poorly on inkjet printers. But, quickdraw graphics will print just fine. So, what's the problem? None really except that quickdraw is not as versatile as postcript in the graphics area in the area of resizing.
So if you print primarily text then an inkjet printer is probably your best bet.
StyleWriter printers
The styleWriter has become a very, very popular printer. It's low cost, compact size, good print capability, and ability to be networked have made it attractive to many.
Since the StyleWriter is a quickdraw (described earlier) printer it does have it's networking limitations. All processing is done by the computer so it does tie up your computer while printing. Also, if you are on a network and people are trying to print to a Stylewriter you will have to wait for the sluggish cue of computers processing and printing. Also if you have a server you are going through it will have to have all the fonts you are wishing to print.
When your StyleWriter doesn't print
If you've recently put in a new ink cartridge and it doesn't seem to give any ink as the printer is trying to print then maybe you need a cleaning. Try these tips.
窶｢ Make sure you have peeled the seal off the head of the cartridge.
窶｢ Choose options after choosing print from the file menu. Click the Clean ink cartridge option and then Okay. The StyleWriter will attempt to clean itself by pushing through any caked up ink and then it will shut itself off.
You can print a test page by holding down the on button.
StyleWriter II
A few tips to make your life easier:
窶｢ Don't let the paper feed get empty. 10-20 or so papers in the tray will reduce any paper jams.
