PRINTER
PRIMER
CHARLES COLE
CHARLES COLE
Q. Kamikaze Komputers is having a blowout sale on printers. Which ones work with my 8-bit?
From information I have been able to glean and personal experience, 24-pin dot matrix printers work OK with our Atari 8-bit machines as long as you only want to do straight text with the printer's built-in type fonts. In that situation the print pins are controlled by the printer's internal CPU to form their characters, not by the word processor; therefore, they are OK for use with AtariWriter Plus, Paper Clip, Text Pro, Ist Xlent Word Processor, etc. The Epson LX printer driver should work with any of them.
These printers will not, however, work properly with Daisy Dots, Print Shop, Billboard, or other "text processors" that use a printer's graphics mode to print text unless they are fully Epson LX, FX, or MX compatible, and you cannot download external fonts to them, because their command set and paper advance commands are different than those of a 9-pin printer.
This is what Ben Poehland referred to in his Dream Street column in Atari Classics when he stated that we need a Daisy Dots program with "correct aspect ratio" for a 24-pin printer. Daisy Dots uses a printer's graphics mode. Because of the different graphics commands between 9- and 24-pin machines, 24pin printers squash the characters and leave a horizontal white streak between head passes. Straight graphics on a 24-pin printer produce the same results. For instance, if you try to print a Koala picture with one of the graphic dump programs, a white streak is left across the page between each head pass, and the picture gets compressed vertically. A similar problem exists, to a much lesser extent, with a 9-pin printer when you convert a Print Shop icon to Daisy Dots III format if you don't reset the character spacing to zero; however, in this case, the white streaks run vertically through the icons, not horizontally.
Using a 24-pin printer in 9-pin emulation mode to print with Daisy Dots III, Print Shop, Newsroom, etc., can cause premature and uneven wear of nine of the printhead's pins, which could ultimately result in poor quality 24-pin printing.
Information received from Jeff McWilliams indicates that the Epson Stylus 800 ink jet printer suffers from the same printing problems when used with an Atari machine.
The Epson literature indicates that it has four scalable fonts; however, these can be used only with a straight word processor program that can send control codes to the printer, and the automatic line centering commands such as those in AtariWriter Plus (CTRL-C) will not automatically center scalable fonts. This is something that has to be calculated manually for each centered line, based on the size of the characters. In short, a real hit-and-miss affair.
The Stylus will not do graphics, either (at least not on an 8-bit Atari). Another quirk of the Stylus is a 61-lines-per-page limitation instead of the normal 66 lines with other printers. This is due to the Stylus using cut sheets, which need extra margin at the top and bottom for the paper handling mechanism.
Needless to say, it will not work with any of the graphics text processors, such as Daisy Dots, and you cannot download additional fonts to it, either.
Another problem with scalable fonts is that they also expand vertically, and cut down on the number of lines per page. Atari word processors are not going to realize this, however, and will still count a line printed in 36-point type as only one page line, instead of three. This throws the page break way off if you have a lot of these lines on a page.
Bob Woolley says the original HP DeskJet and the DeskJet Plus (but not the current DeskJet 500 series) can emulate an Epson FX-80 using the HP plug-in cartridge 22707F. This gives very close to Epson eqivalent output with the exception of placement. Unfortunately, Deskjets cannot print within 1/2 inch of the bottom of the page which may affect your output format. In PrintShop, for example, the last few lines of the border fall off the bottom of the page and end up on the next sheet. You can work around this by using 14 inch long (legal sized) paper and trimming it back to 11 inches. Otherwise, the output matches Epson text and graphics exactly.
One of the newest laser printers, the Sharp JX-9400, priced at only $479 at Max Club and by various mail-order sources that advertise in Computer Shopper, is fully Epson FX-80 compatible and will print properly with any Atari 8-bit program that is designed to print to an Epson compatible dot-matrix printer. This printer also offers HP PCL 4, IBM ProPrinter, IBM Graphics Printer, and Diablo 630/630 ECS emulations, and can even be connected through a switchbox to more than one computer (as can any other printer).
This printer counts a full page as 63 lines, so your word processor's top and bottom margins must be reset accordingly. With Daisy-Dots III, this means shortening the page length setting by at least 36/72" so your page breaks will come out correctly. This is the only adjustment that needs to be made to switch from a 9-pin dot-matrix printer to the Sharp JX-9400.