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