Scripting in style
It is no longer vital to have an expensive colour laser printer connected
to your Mac when one of the many colour inkjet printers will suffice. But
if you want colour PS prints, especially for output from applications like
XPress, PageMaker or Illustrator, you may be faced with a $2,900+ price
tag (plus consumables) for a colour laser printer. Alternatively, you can
buy a PS RIP (Rasterised Image Processor) for an inkjet and for as little
as $195 turn it into a PS printer.
StyleScript is a PS interpreter for Apple StyleWriter printers. It intercepts
the output from certain applications, processes it on the Mac, then sends
the data to the printer. Not all applications' output will work with SS:
some applications like ClarisWorks send QuickDraw output to the printer.
One obvious benefit of SS is that it turns the StyleWriter into a lo-res
colour laser printer. On the other hand, it also means that yet another
package reduces the performance of the Mac. A PS laser printer has RAM
and a PS processor built into the hardware; inkjet printers do not. This
means SS use the Mac to process and feed all the data to the printer: the
faster the Mac, the faster the process. SS needs a minimum of 5Mb of RAM,
and memory requirements increase with the size and quantity of pages sent
to the printer. (It also takes a chunk - at least 5Mb - of hard disk space.)
A printout can take from 5 to 15 minutes to be processed. On the examples
I tested using XPress, the processing time for half an A4 page of text
(four font styles) was just below 5 minutes. In this case, even a PowerMac
(for which the product is accelerated) grinds to a halt while the sophisticated
processing is carried out. It took about 2 minutes to get the computer
back and then working in another application was too jerky to worry about.
SS is a run-it-and-leave-it processor.
Print Server
SS has its own Print Server application, which is launched when the printer
driver is selected or when output is sent to the StyleWriter. But don't
be confused: this is a local extension that manages the processing between
the print spooler and the printer.
The Print Server does not control network access to the printer. In fact,
SS cannot be used for network access or even printer sharing. According
to makers of SS, the terms of their licence do not allow them to network
SS. (That undermines one of the better aspects of the colour StyleWriters
as networkable printers.) The suggested way around this is for users to
purchase multiple StyleWriters - one for each desk. This strikes me as
a rather expensive way of getting a low-cost proofing printer: I'd rather
buy a high speed networkable PS colour laser printer.
The Print Server is very basic, with a display to show printing progress,
preferences that control how long the server stays open and the ability
to create a log file.
The nicest thing about SS is that you don't need to understand anything
about PS to use it. In theory, anyway. The nastiest aspect is that trying
to work out what went wrong is almost impossible if you don't understand
PS. I experienced a few problems with SS at the beginning (before I read
the manual!), so I tried to read the log file to discover the error. Rather
than telling me something simple like "the pages didn't print because
SS couldn't find the fonts", I had to wade through lines of PS code
to discover the same thing.
Should you buy it?
An interesting aside... I received a CD demo version of this software as
well as the 5-disk installation kit. The demo version has two ReadMe files:
one for users and another for dealers. The latter version suggested installing
SS and setting aside between 12Mb and 24Mb of RAM to demonstrate the product.
The user file suggests a minimum of 5Mb!
According to the marketing blurb, SS is aimed at graphic artists, business
and home or educational users who want a fast and economical alternative
to buying a PS printer. Personally, I would have thought any graphic artist
worth her salt working with PostScript, EPS or layout files would want
the real thing. But I could be wrong!
For the business, home or educational user, SS is a lovely idea and a potentially
inexpensive alternative to buying a colour PS printer: although the waiting
time also needs be taken into account.
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