COMMUNICATING WITH A LASER Electronic publishing may revolutionize the business of nonprofit organizations STEVE JOHNSON & BETTY DURHAM Until recently the ability of the small computer as a word processor, no matter how sophisticated the software, has been limited by the quality of printers. Most personal computer users have been forceq to choose between speed and quality. Less expensive, but high speed, printers using a dot matrix process are great workhorses for businesses that crank out reams of financial statements. For higher quality work, more expensive and slower daisy wheel (also called letter-quality) printers, which imitate the impact printing wheel of electronic typewriters, have been available. Over the last several years the distance between the two types of printers has narrowed. Dot matrix printers have increased the quality of print (often at the loss of some speed), and daisy-wheel printers have increased their output speed. Then two years ago a new type of printer appeared, the laser printer. The laser printer, while not as fast as a dot matrix printer, is faster than a letter-quality printer, and offers a quality of type unsurpassed by any other printers for · desktop computers, and in fact challenges the domain of professional typesetting. Hewlett Packard was the first company on the market with a laser printer. Their product, the Lascrjet printer, selling more than any other, has proven itself to be a quiet (fewer moving parts, no impact devices) alternative to the· daisy wheel printer. Steve Johnson is editor of RAIN and manages CUE 's desktop publishing service. Betty Durham is a free lance graphic designer and desktop publishing trainer at CUE. Page 10 RAIN Fall/Winter 1986 But it is Apple's Laserwriter printer that initiated the desktop publishing revolution. The Laserwriter was the first programmable las~r printer. Postscript, a page-description language developed by Adobe Inc. in California, helps the Laserwriter reproduce full pages of text and graphics at 300 dots per square inch, over four times the resolution of the HP Laserjet. Pof?tscript allows the Laserwriter to treat characters as graphic clements. The instructions provided to the Laserwriter are made mathematical formulas responsible for precise shaping of characters. The size of the type is limited only by the size of the paper. The Laserwriter comes with 1/1.5 megabytes of R.AM and a half megabyte of ROM, that stores a library of fonts that can be reproduced in different sizes and styles using Postscript. And, most important, Apple already had the Macintosh, a computer whose potential as an electronic publishing tool was realized with the introduction of the Laserwriter. When first introduced, the Macintosh was thought of as a cute computer-a term one would never apply to an IBM computer. With a weird device to replace curser keys, called a mouse, the use of pictures (icons) instead of command keys, the Macintosh seemed to have no particular niche. It seemed too expensive to penetrate the home computer market, and too cute for the more serious business world. The Macintosh has several key features that make it a good electronic publishing tool. The high resolution of the Macintosh screen makes it possible to view and work with both text and
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