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Freedom of Press Classic



Author: Stuart Perry
Date: January, 1994
Keywords: Colorage printing printer software review utility
Text: When I received ColorAge's Freedom of Press Classic, I was excited. Here was a chance to exploit the possibilities of my messy, ink-jet printer. I'd seen the ads in the back of MacUser promising new life for ''my non-Post Script printer''. Well, did my poor ink jet receive a Post Script baptism, and is Freedom of Press worth canceling any plans of buying a real post script printer? The answer to both of these questions is a definite maybe. What's It Supposed to do? Using Freedom of Press can be likened to bringing your Mother on a date. While she'll go overboard to make sure every- thing is neat and tidy, she's an interloper who would drastically slow down the events of the night. That's what Freedom does, it stands between your work, which needs to be printed, and your printer that wants to, well, print. Freedom uses the LaserWriter Printer Driver which comes bundled with the application. So, you may say to yourself, ''I don't own a LaserWriter, that's why I bought this Post Script interpreter for my printer.'' Well, you see, that's the Freedom of Press trick. First you select LaserWriter from your Chooser, then you have to choose an actual Post Script, LaserWriter printer. The problem: you don't have one. That's why ColorAge includes a tiny application called FP Spooler (the FP stands for Freedom of Press). It works like your favorite Print Monitor in that it receives and stores your documents. When you're ready to print, you have to open up Freedom of Press, the application, which then searches FP Spooler for any Post Script LaserWriter files and begins to render and interpret them. If you've managed to get this far, you might be OK. If you've had some problems, don't go looking to the manual for help. Baffled by the manual's encryptions, I thought that I'd call their tech support for some added help, but the phone just rang and rang. I tried again about three hours later with the same results. The Test If you own a Cannon, StyleWriter, a Hewlett Packard, or any other ink-jet printer for that matter, Freedom of Press Classic supports it. That's Freedom's biggest asset - the number of printer platforms that it supports. If you have a QuickDraw laser printer, you're not left out in the cold either. Freedom of Press has a generic QuickDraw driver that promises (I wasn't able test any,) to work with any printer, including the workhorse and our old friend, the dot-matrix. I concentrated my tests on two printers that most people are familiar with, The Hewlett Packard DeskWriter C, and Apple's StyleWriter II. I tested for rendering speed, memory allocation, (how much space both in RAM and on my Hard Drive that was required), and lastly, output image quality. I used a Mac IIsi to do all of the computing, MicroTek's Scanmaker II for scanning, and Adobe PhotoShop 2.01 to process the images. Now while the IIsi isn't the speediest machine, some would say it's a slug, I figured it would work just fine. So keep this in mind when I talk about Freedom's snail-paced interpreting and rendering speed. So I tried printing a variety of things: Excel charts, scanned images in both color and greyscale, and PostScript fonts just to name a few things. What did I find? On the whole, Freedom produced relatively intense graphics, and sharper fonts with two notable drawbacks. First, Freedom of Press prints at a maximum resolution of 72 dpi. If you have a printer that runs around 300dpi, like mine, you're out of luck. Sure Freedom will produce nice, round-dithered, Post Script quality output, but because the resolution is so low, you'll probably only use it to send scanned pictures of yourself to family members at Christmas time. Secondly, Freedom really stressed my ink-jet cartridge and even after switching to H.P.'s special CX paper, it caused considerable bleeding on and through the page. Also, it occasionally produced white, horizontal bars through darker sections of my images. After draining half my ink cartridge on a nice color scan, to find these nasty white bars striping the page was extremely frustrating. The interpreting and rendering wasn't really all that bad, even though it was dreadfully slow at times. What hung up the process more than anything was all the anti-intuitive processing you had to go through just to render a page; i.e. Go to Chooser. Select The LaserWriter. The LaserWriter requires AppleTalk. Whoops! Have to Restart to turn it On. Restarted, OK. Now what? Oh yeah, go back to Chooser and select the LaserWriter. Oh no, I forgot to turn on FP Spooler. Darn. Quit Chooser and open FP Spooler and then reopen Chooser. Choose The LaserWriter and select FP Spooler as my Mac LaserWriter. Done? Yes, done. Whew! You have to go through this process each time you start-up your Mac. Well Should I Buy It? I have considered buying Freedom of Press for about a year now. I've seen the ads in the back of MacUser and MacWorld as I mentioned above. I thought to myself, ''I won't have to throw out my ink-jet and buy new LaserWriter.'' Well, I also still believe in Santa Claus. You don't get something for nothing, as the clich* goes, and Freedom of Press is no exception. Most of the text cleanup it performs can be achieved with TrueType fonts. If you need PostScript quality output, my advice would be to buy a PostScript Printer (they're really getting cheap.) If your needs are less intensive, say adding a little spot color, or you want to send neat greeting cards to your relatives then perhaps Freedom's for you. Freedom of Press, version 4.0, listed at $149.00, street price of $75.00, is available from: ColorAge, 900 Technology Park Drive, Billerica, MA 01821 (508) 667-8585

Copyright © january, 1994 by Stuart Perry


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