Product Reviews

One of the great divisions between the Mac and the rest of the computing world is the former's insistence on serial printing. With a handful of exceptions, very few printer manufacturers offer both Mac-compatible serial and PC-compatible parallel ports in the same printer. PowerPrint is a neat solution to the problem, packaged as a simple combination of hardware and software.

The hardware is nothing more than a serial-to-parallel adaptor cable: just plug one end into your Mac's printer port and the other into the parallel socket at the back of a PC printer. The software consists of a set of printer drivers which can be installed individually or en masse, plus a couple of small spooler extensions.

Once set up, you just have to select a driver for the printer in the normal way by clicking on an icon in the Chooser and selecting the correct serial port - printer or modem. The drivers and cable work as serial rather than LocalTalk media, so AppleTalk needs to be disabled

ADVERTISEMENT

for the printer port. Most Mac personal printers require this anyway, so it's no great sacrifice.

When you go to print in any application, custom Print and Page Setup dialog boxes appear. In general, they look very small and dull, but they actually allow control over most, if not all, special features of the printer the driver was designed for. For example, you may be able to control dots per inch, line screen resolution, N-up printing and so on; the choice differs from driver to driver.

A collection of popular dot matrix, inkjet and laser drivers are provided in the package, covering a good 1500 models once you take printer emulation into account. In theory, if you can't find the required printer model in PowerPrint 4.5, you can still try to print using another driver which supports the same industry-standard emulation as the printer you're using, such as Epson FX and LQ, and Hewlett-Packard's PCL. At the other extreme, Infowave has developed a special driver with Hewlett-Packard for the DeskJet 890C colour inkjet, featuring colourful Print dialog boxes and full options.

However, PowerPrint 4.5 isn't all-encompassing. In particular, it can't operate memory-free GDI personal laser printers which were built to hook into Microsoft Windows graphics libraries or designed to work exclusively with the proprietary Windows Printing System.

In practice, PowerPrint 4.5's support for colour inkjets and office lasers more than makes up for this. And PowerBook travellers will love the ability to plug into virtually any parallel printer they find.