At home I have a 400 MHz iMac SE
running OS X 10.1. This machine is connected to my small home
network and prints on a shared LaserWriter IIg. This ten-year-old laser
printer (the Mac IIfx among the
laser printers) is equipped with a 68030 processor for processing print
jobs, 8 MB internal memory, and an ethernet port. It can print up to 8
pages a minute and talks Postscript level 2.
Eight pages a minute - it does that when printing from a
floppy-driven Mac Plus or a
IIci, and it does that when I run
Mac OS 9.21 on my iMac.
So far so good.
Things go wrong when I try to print Web pages from OS X
browsers like Explorer 5.1, Mozilla, or OmniWeb. It takes the computer
about 7 minutes to produce printouts from moderately complicated
Web pages that classic mode browsers like Internet Explorer 5.0 or
Netscape Navigator 4.0.8 can print in just one minute.
This is a really bad thing. Postscript is Postscript. It shouldn't
matter a bit which operating system one uses when printing. The print
speed should totally depend on the speed of the printer and its
connection to the network.
Yet Apple managed to slow my printing to a crawl with the OS X
"print center." What a piece of crap! (I sometimes wonder if Apple even
though about printers when they produced OS X. The fact that it
isn't possible to print directories forces one to reboot in Mac OS 9.21
in order to print the contents of a folder or disk.)
In order to find a solution to the slow printing of Web pages, I
searched the Web and went through the (rather limited) setup options of
the print window. I could not find a solution. The only way out seemed
to be the use of a classic browser, because the classic print software
(the good old system 6 era Print Monitor) still prints just as fast as
ever.
I don't like this. It's not that I have something against using
classic stuff (e.g. I use the classic version of Eudora 5 for my mail),
but I really liked the OS X version of Mozilla 0.96. It is so much
faster and more stable than Internet Explorer 5. Luckily the classic
version of Mozilla is also pretty good, and I'm pretty impressed with
iCab.
The very slow printing wasn't the only bug in the OS X print
software. When I tried to save stuff as a Postscript document instead
of sending it directly to the printer, the program refused to produce a
valid document - that is, when it managed to produce a document at
all. The classic printing software did this without any problems, just
like we have been used to over the past 15 years.
I copied the Postscript file to the hard drive on my IIci running
System 6 and downloaded it to the LaserWriter using good old
LaserWriter Utility 7.4.1. The 25 MHz 68030 IIci with 8 MB RAM and a
200 MB hard disk managed to print within a minute a Web page that took
7 minutes on a 400 MHz G3 iMac with 256 MB RAM and a 13 gig hard
disk.
The OS X LaserWriter driver is seriously flawed. I hope Apple does
something about this soon, because right now this operating system is
pretty useless when it comes to handling Postscript jobs.
This is not something you would expect from the company that brought
us the "desktop publishing revolution."
is a longtime Mac user, a writer, the publisher of System 6
Heaven, and believes printing is one of the more important things a
Mac can do. He lives in the Netherlands.
