Printers aplenty - GDT Softworks' PowerPrint 2.5 printer support software - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Feb, 1995

Rating: * * * 1/2 PowerPrint Version Reviewed: 2.5 List Price: $149 Average Street Price: $99 Publisher: GDT Softworks, (604) 291-9121, (800) 663-6222 MAC Sometimes it's the simple things in life that make all the difference. The PowerPrint package consists of an adapter cable, a background printing program, and a collection of drivers that let Macintosh users print to an assortment of more than 1,000 dot-matrix, ink-jet, and laser printers normally intended for use only with DOS-compatible computers. This may not sound too exciting at first, but expanding your Mac's printing compatibility can easily save enough money, time, and headaches to make PowerPrint one of the best money-saving investments you can make.

If you are upgrading your present system, or even if you're buying your first, PowerPrint enables you to either continue using your current printer or--as we did--choose a DOS-compatible laser and spend $200 to $400 less than what you'd pay for a comparable Mac model.

Some tasks, such as printing multiple-part forms or creating ditto masters, require a dot-matrix impact printer. Apple's ImageWriter 11 is compact and rugged but also noisy and expensive, and its print quality is mediocre. PowerPrint allows you to use DOS units such as the 24-pin Epson LQ800 to make a considerably more elegant impression. If you're a PowerBook user, you've probably experienced the frustration of not being able to find a Mac-compatible printer when you're in a client's office or on the road. With PowerPrint's serial-parallel adapter cable tucked in your laptop case and drivers for HP and Epson printers installed in your System folder, you should have no problem printing a document right on the spot using virtually any PC printer.

The real beauty of PowerPrint lies in its ease of use. In most cases, you just install the driver(s) you need from the master disk, plug in the adapter cable, and use the Chooser and Page Setup commands as you usually would. If some of the options look strange, a quick check in the excellent manual clears things up in a hurry.

We used PowerPrint with an HP DeskJet Plus, Canon BJC-820 color ink jet, and a Brother HL-630 laser printer. In each case, setting up was simple, and printing was quick and produced high-quality results, with no discernible difference from a similar Mac-compatible model. Even though GDT Softworks recommends a minimum of IMB of RAM in laser printers, the data compression used in such 512K machines as the Okidata 400e and our Brother HL-630 was more than adequate to handle pages crammed with clip art and several fonts.

The PowerPrint drivers work by translating your Mac's QuickDraw output into the printer's native language (PCL 4, PCL 5, Epson graphics, and so on). This means that you will have no problem printing TrueType fonts or object-oriented graphics, and PostScript fonts are no hassle if you have Adobe Type Manager installed.

PostScript graphics, however, are another story. No QuickDraw printer (including Apple's LaserWriter 300 models) can do better than a 72dpi (dots per inch) approximation of Postscript graphics. PowerPrint, therefore, is unable to accurately render advanced page layout and illustration programs. And since some drivers handle a number of similar but not identical printers, PowerPrint can't always control every feature. The Canon BJC-600 driver, for example, couldn't activate the "enhanced black" feature that lets our BJC-820 print dense type, and the Laserjet lip driver we used with the Brother HL-630 printer couldn't activate that unit's toner-saving economy mode.

All in all, however, PowerPrint does exactly what it's supposed to do with a minimum of fuss. If saving time and money interest you, and you don't use PostScript graphics, we think that PowerPrint is a must, especially if you have a DOS computer as well as a Mac, or if you're a PowerBook user on the move. CIRCLE 110 ON READER SERVICE CARD