I always get really poor text quality with MacPalette II though, so if
anyone else is using it and knows what I'm doing wrong, let me know.
IIRC, MacPalette II only prints in Tall Adjusted, so many the poor
text is
just an artifact of that, or maybe one is meant to use different
fonts.
Er, no. It was designed primarily for C.A.D. and simple pictures, so
text quality was not a high priority.
Its too long ago, but when I wrote MacPalette 1, it was based on the
ImageWriter 1 driver. MacPalette 2 was in turn based on MacPalette 1.
The text is just imaged into the off screen pixmap by QuickDraw so
MacPalette does not have much control on what it looks like. I think
there were some Apple magic font adjustment tables in there, maybe
they were in a resource where you could edit them. They controlled
things like how many pixels to offset the images of the characters by
when making bold text and maybe things I never got into, which might
be useful to you. I just had a look on my hard drive and I have a
floppy disk image of MacPalette II, but on my Intel Mac, double
clicking it says the application to open it is not supported on this
system.
I found the paragraph below on the web when I Googled "Apple font
characterisation table", unfortunately at the time, Apple had not
documented it, and it seems like they never got around to it.
"For certain types of devices, such as a screen or the ImageWriter
printer, the Font Manager uses the font characterization table from
the device driver to determine any additional information that
QuickDraw may need. The font characterization table contains
information about the dots per vertical inch and dots per horizontal
inch for that device, along with information about the different
styles that the device can produce. Non-QuickDraw devices, such as
the LaserWriter printer, return an error when the Font Manager
requests their font characterization table."
Roger Holmes,
Technical Director, Microspot Ltd.