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Personal LaserWriter 300?
Authored by: bOOzo on Nov 19, '02 02:55:09PM

I was very excited when i first saw this topic, but it did not work for me.. Is Apple Personal LaserWriter 300 not supported..?



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Personal LaserWriter 300?
Authored by: sfn on Nov 19, '02 10:08:24PM

The 300 is a serial Quickdraw printer so I don't think this hint applies but I too am looking for a solution to use this printer in X.



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Personal LaserWriter 300?
Authored by: Bassil on Nov 19, '02 11:31:46PM

Two thoughts here:

1) what about a USB -> (Mac) serial adapter?
(or a USB -> PC serial -> Mac serial adapter?)

has anyone given that a spin?

eg. iPrint Serial , or a Griffin Technology gPort or one of their other serial adapters. The serial Laserwriters in particular were not listed but I wonder... be nice to see confirmation that they do indeed work with this printer.

2) The million dollar idea.

Assuming you still have an old Mac that will hook up to and work with the serial LaserWriter, try this:

print all your documents on the OS X machine to PDF.
If you Print then because you have no printer, it will pop up a dialog and one of the options is "save as PDF"
So save it.
Maybe you can even get like like a stub driver for OS X much like the old Mac OS 8/9 PrintToPDF Chooser extensions? That would only save like 1 step and 5 seconds so it's not critical.

Now ship your file over to your old Mac (set up network, use a Zip disk, whatever you like)... fire up the free Adobe Acrobat Reader on the old Mac, ... now print.

Now that might be mildly annoying but if you did something incredibly smart like File Sharing between the Macs, and then used something like Apple's Folder Actions or a scheduling (cron-like) utility with AppleScripts you could print anything that dropped into some given shared folder. Make sense?

Now I'm far too busy just now to go through all this, but here's what I envision:

Mac OS X computer
print - save as PDF
save/copy PDF file to a Shared Folder accessible by both Mac's.
OS 9 Mac automatically sees the new PDF file (via script/util)
Using Acrobat or other application, prints the PDF file

rinse and repeat.

(or take out the "automatic" part and just print it manually... you could batch up your jobs all day and then print them all at night when electricity is cheaper. ;-)


If you try this out, post what you do and if you use any neat utils or write some AppleScripts, please post too.

If no one goes for this, I'll probably get some free time kinda mid-December to drag out my old Mac and LW 300.

Cheers,
Callum



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Personal LaserWriter 300?
Authored by: MacGoddess on Nov 21, '02 12:02:59PM

OSX does not support serial port printing, and I believe the PLW 300 is a serial port only printer, so I think you're probably SOL. But, if you have one of the older laserwriters other than the PLW 300, you either have to use a print server, and localtalk bridge like others have posted, or get an iPrint adapter which connects to Localtalk on your printer and to Ethernet on your computer or hub, or a parallel to USB cable is also supported, if your printer has a parallel port. OSX also does not support Postscript Level 1 printers. If your laserwriter is postscript level 2 or 3, it has been supported in OSX all along. The PLW 320, for example, is a pslevel 2 printer, so it is supported in that regard. But, if your laserwriter is postscript level 1 only (Like the Laserwriter, the Laserwriter II, IINT and IINTX for example), it is not supported in OSX. Up until recently that is. : ) Make sure that your laserwriter is turned on before installing! Install Ghostscript first and then install the pslevel1 drivers. Then hold down the option key and click on Add Printer in the Print Center. Hopefully, you should be able to see your printer. In my case, I found mine under the regular Appletalk menu, not under Advanced. Choose the appropriate ppd file for your printer, and you should be printing...finally!



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Personal LaserWriter 300?
Authored by: markgill on Nov 27, '02 08:16:35PM

What I don't understand is why I can print to my PLW 300 from Classic, but not from Jaguar. Just because it is serial should not matter. I can see it using atlookup, so why can't I send it data to print?



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Personal LaserWriter 300?
Authored by: MacGoddess on Nov 29, '02 05:59:24AM

You should definitely check out http://www.balthisar.com/printing/index.html. It might give you some ideas on how to make it work.



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Balthazar's experiments partially succeeds
Authored by: markgill on Nov 30, '02 12:59:26PM

When I issue the command atlookup I find Printer:LWSelect300 on my little network. It is connected to my wife's OS 9 PowerBook through iDock (serial to USB). This is good. However, when I attempt to print my sample document, which I created using print to file in Classic, using the command atprint Printer:LWSelect300 < LW300.prn the command times out (ATPsndreq: Operatin timed out). I think this step should work, but I don't know what to test next.



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