troff, Transcript, and the Apple Laserwriter (summary)

[T. Scott Pyne]

[]
Well, it has been a week since my posting asking for experiences with
Adobe Systems' Transcript package to interface troff to the Apple
Laserwriter.  I've received 8 replies via mail, and several more have
been posted as followup articles.  Thanks to all of you who responded.
The unanimous opinion of the mail replies has been: Transcript and
the Laserwriter work extremely well.  (Several respondents said
"works perfectly/flawlessly".)  The binary version from Adobe is
said to work fine under 4.2 on a VAX.  The LW fonts are said to be
lovely, too.

The only non-positive comments were (1) that you have to physically
change cables to go from using the LW with (e.g.) a VAX to using it
with a Macintosh; (2) that troff limits the number of typefaces which
can be used in a single file, so you cannot easily mix, e.g., Times
Roman and Helvetica in the same file; and (3) that everyone likes
it so much that you spend lots of money on the expensive toner
cartridges for the LW while people experiment.  Problem (2) can be
alleviated if you are willing to edit the Postscript intermediate
file before it goes to the LW.  Postscript is readable ASCII, so
this task is not especially difficult.  BTW, you can of course
write your own Postscript and send it to the LW if you are so
inclined.

Neil Groundwater (seismo!hadron!sundc!harry!npg), an employee of
Sun, mentioned that Sun resells the LW with Transcript and some
extra tools such as LWGRIND (similar to vgrind), a previewer
to show the output accurately on a Sun display, and a screen-dump
utility for Suns.  Chris Tweed (mcvax!edcaad.ed.ac.uk!chris)
mentioned that Transcript comes with "a program that prints text
files (e.g. source code, non-roffed text etc.) in a selected font
and size."

Scott Bradner (harvard!talcott!sob) mentioned that Harvard was
also using Transcript to drive a Linotron 300P 2480dpi (!) laser
typesetter which spoke Postscript.  So, if 300dpi isn't enough....

My personal opinion: for a combined list price under $10K it
sounds unbeatable.  If my computer budget comes through this
year, Hadron will certainly be acquiring one.  If you have Suns,
it just gets better.

DISCLAIMER:  I *still* haven't used Transcript, so everything
you just read was condensed from the replies I received.  A note
to those people who were nice enough to respond to me:  Thanks,
and I hope I represented your views accurately.

						Scott

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T. Scott Pyne, Hadron Inc.
UUCP: seismo!hadron!tsp