Another printing gripe

[AMC258]

I have an HP LaserJet 6MP.  This is by far the best printer I've ever owned, and I'm giving it up for nothing.

It is on a Netgear printserver, and all my Amigas, PC's, and Sparcstations can print to it, and this works great.

I dumped TurboPrint when I upgraded to OS3.5, and I currently run OS3.9 and use the printing system that comes with that.

Here's the problem:  In the Printer preferences, I cannot adjust the top of the page.  I can adjust the left, right, and bottom, but not the top.  Everything I print from my Amigas is 1.5 lines off the top of the printable area on the page.
I don't know what I did with my TurboPrint disks, so I don't know if I want to bother with that option.
I have actually written a program to add extra blank lines to text files so I can print them.  This is really annoying.
Am I just doing something wrong, or is there something I'm missing?
I use U.S. Letter and U.S. Legal paper.  Maybe there is something metric about the print driver??

[stopthegop]

I have same exact problem.  Either that or we are both "doing something wrong".  Funny because I'm working on a little program right now to try and fix that and some other printing related annoyances.     My printer is not HP, though.  Its Brother -- "poor mans" HP.  

[Hyperspeed]

The part of Turboprint I use the most is the Graphics Publisher. I love the way it reads the file data to print at the highest possible resolution as opposed to dumping screen graphics. How do you manage without this?

I'm not sure what exactly is going wrong with your setup but I know that some printers have an internal limitation as to where they can print for mechanical reasons. Could you be losing part of the print because the laser simply won't go there?

Epson printers have weird unprintable areas - it's like 0.32cm for the left, 0.34cm for the right, 1.1 for the top or something like that.

Also, Line Feeds might be put into the data flow if your page sizes are set at DIN A4 which will prematurely end a U.S. page.

Graphics printing is set to Bounded right? Not Absolute or Pixels?

[AMC258]

I have tried every combination of paper setting, but with only two physical paper sizes.  I don't have any A4 paper..

I have no problems with graphics, just text.  When I print text, the first line on a page doesn't print at all, and on the second line, only the bottom half of the text prints.
I believe this is the printer's limitation, but, is there a way to tell the print driver to try and print in bounds?

For whatever reason, I installed TurboPrint.  Don't know why I never bothered to look for the disks before today.  BUT, I have the opposite problem now.  No matter what I set for the vertical text boundaries in TurboPrefs, I get an extra blank line at the top of the page and a half a printed line at the bottom!

I *rarely* print graphics.  Other than postscript, via IBrowse.  It sure is great having a postscript printer!
I used to use Graphics Publisher a lot, and I tried it out just now to see if I still have the same problems, and yes I do.  It always locks up after it's done printing, and it locks up all VNC shells too, I guess I should be looking for Enforcer hits.  But, like I said, I generally don't print graphics, especially not on a black and white printer.

Here's another question that's been bugging me the past year or so:  Is there a genuine color HP LaserJet printer that is supported in any way on the Amiga?  I don't want to buy one and find out the hard way.

[Hyperspeed]

Maybe you have to set the paper length to 66 lines for A4 (210x297mm) or whatever U.S.Legal is. I had problems with text printing in DOpus so I set the print pitch to Fine, 15-cpi or something.

Try it with 'Cut Sheet' not continuous paper feed,

TurboPrint 7.5 here has the following drivers:

HP_LaserJet2
HP_LaserJet3
HP_LaserJet4
HP_LaserJet4L
HP_LaserJet5Series
HP_LaserJet6Series

Wasn't the LaserJet 5 a colour?

[AMC258]

I can set it to 66, 96, 23, 1, or whatever, and it still runs off the page.  It's not on continuous paper.  I used to have a LaserJet 5.  No it's not color.  Neither is the 6.
I should look into upgrading my TurboPrint, I have version 7.1.

[Hyperspeed]

I upgraded from TurboPrint 5 to 7.5 but it didn't change much other than more drivers. Version 5 was damn good and the Graphics Publisher seemed a little 'crisper' in operation back then.

I know the latest 7.x ones allowed the Epson C64(!) which can do 5670 DPI or something like that.

TurboPrint's dithering/colour tables don't really compare too well with a PC (at least not on the older drivers) but its' output is still highly impressive.

[AMC258]

I remember when I first got Studio on my A500, and it had better color and dithering than anything else I could get my hands on.  It would take my A500 2 hours to print a full page in color on my HP600C ( which was the latest greatest home color printer at the time ), but it was worth it.  Naturally, I could print faster once I upgraded from the stock 68000.

[Hyperspeed]

Yeah, before I got a Blizzard 1230-IV many moons ago it would take a good 45 minutes on the A1200 to print an A4 24-bit picture.

My first printer was the Canon BJC-600 bubblejet which was 360 dpi and could use 4 seperate ink carts (cost me £500 GBP!). This was state of the art back in '95/'96 when people were rushing out to buy the Citizen 24-pin printer.

;-)

Getting good print results will probably be one of the most frustrating things you can learn about in computing. The reams of paper and gallons of ink I have gone through are quite scary!

Losing lines and borders is/was a big problem for me. Luckily Turboprint's Graphics Publisher is pre-loaded with the unprintable regions for all the printers in the driver list. ASCII text can be a pain in the arse though, especially since most printers have their own internal fonts and settings.

[AMC258]

I had one of those Citizen printers.  It was full color, but was a disaster.  It actually had some really nice features, but, when printing in color the paper would wrinkle and crinkle badly.  It fried twice, the second time, I didn't bother to get it fixed.  That was my last tractor feed printer.  I need to get another tractor feed one.  Even my 1970's daisy wheel printer has a sheet feeder.