Howdy Fellow Commodore Users!

Hopefully Santa was good to all of you, and brought you some wonderful goodies for your Commodore setup. Santa didn't bring me computer goodies this year, but I did manage to get a Postscript printer from Ebay at a pretty good price.

What is Postscript? Entire books have been written to explain what it is, what it does, why you want it, but I'll try not to take that much space. For those who use the operating system Geos, print output is always considered to be better using a utility found with geoPublish called geoPubLaser. This is found on side B of disk 1 of your geoPublish disk (if you have the newest set of geoPublish disks).

GeoPubLaser would print your output from geoPublish to a properly connected Apple LaserWriter, using it's PostScript ability. That's right! Apple products also work with Commodore computers, too! One of the advantages to using this program, you can print in 300 dots per inch. This is much improved over the 60 thru 80 dots per inch the standard dot matrix printers use. Some standard printers try to get a high quality printout by going over the same line of text more than once. A quick calculation shows that a 4 or 5 time pass over the letter would equal the same quality of print. There have been drivers for a variety of printers that do just this, plus there is a utility called Perfect Print that does this. But, as you can guess, this is very time consuming. A page that might take a minute to print normally now takes 4 or 5 minutes to print. If you have multiple pages (such as a report), it might easily take quite a while to finish printing your output.

Going back to GeoPubLaser, this utility was great IF you had an Apple LaserWriter with the PostScript ability, and the hardware to properly hook everything up. Some geos users wondered if you could use other postscript printers with this utility? It was written pretty specific to the Apple LaserWriter, but zoom ahead from 1988 and you'll find that a newer utility has been created called PostPrint

PostPrint II is a Wheels 64/128 (not GEOS) utility which simplifies and adds new features to the printing of Postscript documents on level 1 or level 2 Postscript printers. PostPrint II is being distributed to owners of Dale Sidebottom's Laser Lovers Disk, which contains the original PostPrint. For those who have seen the wonderful pages printed from the LUCKI club and want to do the same thing on their computer, this is the way to do it. Postscript laser printers are expensive compared to dot matrix printers, but the cost of Postscript inkjet printers are considerably less. A company called electricdeal.com can sell you an Optra 40 for under $200. Used printers (and sometimes new) can be found at places like Ebay. Optra 40s have been selling for under $100 during December.

When I get my disk from Dale Sidebottom and have a chance to play with it some, you may see a club demo in the near future. If you want to see a demo by the master, you might want to check out the Commodore Expo this spring in New Albany Indiana during Memorial Day weekend. Dale has been doing demos on postscript now for as long as I can remember going to expos. My memory must be getting foggy as I can't remember how long ago my first expo was...1997?

PostPrint II can be obtained from Dale Sidebottom, P.O. Box 303, New Albany, IN 47151-0303, U.S.A.. Phone: (812) 944-9132. E-mail: luckykds@iglou.com.