printing

[David.Lamkins@p14.f640.n101.z1.fidonet.org (David Lamkins)]

> Occasionally I like to print out my code (or more often
> results generated by my code). I find that in my current
> configuration Mac IIci, System 7.0+tuneup, 20 meg ram, new
> Stylewriter driver (7.2.2), and ATM, it takes an extremely
> long time: minutes for the first output. I've never timed a
> page because it takes so long. Printing from other programs
> keeps the Stylewriter pretty busy with few pauses, so I don't
> immediately suspect a system setup problem.

I have experienced similar problems when printing to an ImageWriter. I first
noticed (and reported) this with an early MACL release; the poor printing
performance
is still present in MCL 2.0b1p3. I would say that the time to print a page of
text is about an order of magnitude longer in MCL than in other applications
such as MacWrite II and MORE 3.

It takes a while to begin printing the start of the page. After every few
passes
of the printhead, the printer pauses for a long time (longer than the "active"
phase when the printer was active). Size of the memory partition, revision of
the OS and printer driver, and speed of the machine (I've run into this on
both
a Plus and an SE/30) have no significant effect on the speed of printing.

I once saw a note about a problem in the ImageWriter driver that involved
waiting
for a timeout of some 20 seconds or so if you don't feed it fast enough - the
author stumbled upon this when trying to spoof programs into printing while
in the background. I don't know whether this is related, although the 20
second
delay seems similar to what I experience between bursts of printing in MCL.
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