FREEDOM OF PRESS A software program to convert your printer into a Post Script compatible machine. A review By Walt Mills INTRODUCTION Previously, I wrote a review on GoScript giving it an exceptional rating. Freedom of Press is another fantastic contender for the Post Script emulation market. REQUIREMENTS Most any printer, including dot matrix, laser, and ink jet. 4 Megs of hard disk space. The rather large disk space requirement is well worth the investment. A co-processor is highly recommended (for speed) and at least one half megabyte of EMS (expanded) memory is required. Future releases will work from disk similar to GoScript whic can use EMS memory but does not require it. Freedom of Press comes with the full Post Script standard 35 fonts included in it's base price. These fonts may be printed in virtually any point size. Like GoScript, you receive an additional downloadable font(s) by returning the registration card. PRINTER SUPPORT Both Freedom of Press and GoScript support a W I D E range of printers and unless you have a teletype for a printer the chances are very good that your printer is supported. Even if your printer is not listed exactly, most printers emulate at least one popular printer model. Contact the software manufacturer if you have any questions. BASICS Installation is a snap; an INSTALL program is included. All of the proper sub directories are created for you. The fonts are kept in a separate sub directory from the programs which makes everything nice and neat. Manufacturers support is very good. I had a small problem using dynamic downloading of fonts. The technical service person answered my question on the first call! If you do plan to use Microsoft Word 5 and DOWNLOADABLE Bitstream Fonts only at print time, call CAI for a user hint. A printer's description of a font says that it is a collection characters of a single face and a single point size. A true post script printer can scale any font outline from 1 point to about 576 points which is about the size of the letter A which covering an 8.5 X 11 inch page. Freedom of Press can emulate this ability as well. Therefore, the courier faces used in most dot matrix printers would consist of about 4 fixed point fonts: Courier Regular, Bold, Italic, & Bold, Italic The basic Freedom of Press font set includes the following 35 saleable font sets: Times Roman Regular, Bold, Italic, & Bold Italic Helvetica Regular, Bold, Italic, & Bold Italic Courier Regular, Bold, Italic, & Bold Italic Avant Guarde Book, Bold, Italic, & Bold Italic Bookman Light, Bold, Italic, & Bold Italic Helvetica Narrow Light, Bold, Italic, & Bold Italic New Century Schoolbook Light, Bold, Italic, & Bold Italic Palatano Regular, Bold, Italic, & Bold Italic Zapf Chancery Zapf Dingbats Symbol Regular These 35 fonts allow your printer to emulate the current models of any Post Script printer. USAGE Usage is simple. Prepare your document or graphics in the usual manner. Print to a disk file. Execute the following line at the DOS prompt: FP! filename TIME Printing takes about the same time as it would on a Post Script printer. The real difference is that you are using your computer processing instead of the processor in the printer. THE LANGUAGE Post Script is an interpretive language. Your word processor assembles a set of statements for the printer in stead of just the characters needed to print. The engine in the Post Script printer reads these statements and executes the program which produces the high quality output. You can even list the Post Script output to the screen; it's quit readable. RESULTS I am currently using Freedom of Press with a Hewlett Packard Desk Jet Plus. The results rival a QMS-810 Post Script Printer! Most people simply cannot tell the difference between the output of the two machines! (If you are like me and can tell the difference between an original and a copy on a copier, you will see the subtle differences.) FRINGE BENEFITS One of the best features of Freedom of Press is the inclusion of batch files to launch and print directly from many popular software packages. If you use WordPerfect, simply type WP! to launch WordPerfect. Send all of your output to a file and upon terminating the application your files will automatically print. Another feature of Freedom of Press is its allowable use of both wild cards and interactive switches on the command line. If used in a batch file, Freedom of Press may be made to ask if you would like to print now. Printed files may be erased after printing, although I found it quite annoying to find my print files erased if Freedom of Press found an error while processing the print file. This necessitated my restarting the application and printing a new copy to disk. COSTS List price for Freedom of Press is $395.00. With the cost of the Hewlett Packard Deskjet Plus dropping, one could get excellent printouts for about $600.00, street price. Most Post Script printers start at $3000, street price. The Hewlett Packard Laser Jet is about the same street price, including the extra memory required for fonts and graphics. CREDITS Freedom of Press is a commercial program available from Custom Applications, Inc., Building 8, 900 Technology Park Drive, Billerica, MA, 01821-9223. Tel: (508) 667-8585. GoScript is a commercial program available from LaserGo, Inc., 9235 Trade Place, Suite A, San Diago, Calif., 92126. Tel: (619) 530-2400. The author is not affiliated with any of the above companies. All program names are the copyright of the manufacturer. In order for the user to sample the output, I have enclosed several files prepared by Freedom of Press for several printers. In order to keep their size as small as possible, only a sample of the regular typefaces are presented. To make a copy of this file on your printer, type: COPY FOPREV.DOC PRN To make a copy of the sample files, choose the appropriate file, based on the list below and type: COPY filename PRN where filename corresponds to the name below. DESKJET PRN Hewlet Packard DeskJet HPLASER PRN Hewlet Packard Laser Jet EPSONLQ PRN Epson LQ HPPAINT PRN Hewlet Packard Paint Jet NECP5 PRN Nec P5 If you do not have one of the above printers, or if you would just like to see the quality of a complex DeskJet (ink jet technology) printout, send a self addressed business size envelope to: Walt Mills 2579 N. W. 118 Dr. Coral Springs, FL 33065 No telephone calls please, support quality software. These programs were compressed with a registered copy of PKZIP, a quality shareware product.