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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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