Keyboard Handler, fonts & UTF-8

Is anyone keeping the score here?

Is anyone keeping the score here?

Yes.
Do the contestants know how I’m scoring the efforts? Now there’s a question…

Your assertion is ridiculous without a radically different definition of “quality” than I would find acceptable.

That seems likely to be true.

We were producing mostly monochrome academic journals¹, text and diagrams but few halftones (which we didn’t produce on the Acorns) published by Cambridge University Press. We produced camera ready copy at 169% of final size on a 600 dpi direct drive A3 laser printer (manufactured by Calligraph), and matched CUP’s print quality & fonts well enough that no-one at CUP other than the people who actually did the typesetting of our journal up to the changeover could actually tell when it changed. At that time (1992), you’d have been hard pressed to do that on a PC. I knew people doing similar things on Macs, but the system I set up on the Acorns enabled our production editors to be considerably more productive – but it involved a lot of hacking by me.

Perhaps you should be less definitive about how great the Acorn format is then?

Fuxache. I said it was good. I didn’t say it was the best thing since sliced bread. In 1992 it was good enough to compete successfully against the high-end typesetting systems CUP was using – admittedly, certainly, on a specific kind of work, and only with a lot of hacking. Of course PC and Macs have moved on, but the end product (for that specific kind of work) hasn’t changed a lot.

¹ The Journal of Physiology, and The Journal of Experimental Physiology. 200 A4 pages of scientific papers fortnightly, and 100 A5 pages monthly, respectively.

600 dpi direct drive A3 laser printer (manufactured by Calligraph)

Ah that was a great beast, I was very fond of it. It was a 1200×600dpi Toshiba engine with variable dot size. We were a beta tester for Calligraph – what happened to Richard Pillar? I think he went back to South Africa.

You knew Richard? He and I were great friends, his office was just round the corner from ours (we were in rented accommodation in the CUP building). Yes, he went back to South Africa. We stayed in touch for a while, but I’ve not heard from him for a few years now.

We tried very hard to get satisfactory stochastic half-toning out of that printer, but didn’t manage to get anything good enough for CRC for the journals. But text – beautiful. We had two of those 1200×600 beasts, and then later one 1800×900 – essential after we moved to A4 format (we were Octavo, hardback, monthly when I first took over the pre-press operation – hence the 169% rather than 141% A3 for A4).

Yes Richard was a very clever guy and was especially helpful while we were producing the colour newspaper in 94-95 – including getting a replacement podule to us overnight when our printer kept locking up just before deadline. Though full colour was done through our Linotype, we output all mono and spot colour pages through the Calligraph. Superb device.

In comparison CC’s LaserDirect was poor – the Canon engine it used suffered from halos around black text on a tint background, due to electrostatic bleeding on the imaging drum. The Calligraph was so much better.