Laserjet 4 replacement printer driver

[Jim Gold]

I use a LaserJet 4 printer with VPE and I understand that HP's driver does not communicate its font metrics properly to interface with VPE. (Certain fonts print with characters overlapped under VPE.) I remember that in the VPE documentation the suggestion was made to use a Lexmark printer driver with the LJ4 because this avoided the metrics problem.

I used VPE Standard for a long time with no problems. I guess I didn't run into the right combination of font, size, and characters, and I customized the few cases where I might have had problems by individually placing the letters (The only printers we used were LJ4 and LJ4+ printers). Now we use two other printer types, and I've upgraded to VPE Professional, and all of a sudden my old programs (upgraded to VPE-Pro) are producing text with characters overlapping.

Here is my question: Which Lexmark printer should I tell Windows I am using in order to replace the LJ4 drivers? I am using PCL-4 on the LJ4. The Windows New Printer dialog shows lots of Lexmark printers, and I want to pick the one that uses the right metrics for the Laserjet 4.

Thanks in advance,

-- Jim Gold --
jim@goha.com

[IDEAL Software Support]

It is many years ago that someone reported problems with LJ4 drivers. We can not recommend a special Lexmark driver. Before trying a driver, I suggest you enable the option "Print True-Type as Bitmap" (this is also sometimes called "Print True-Type as Graphics") in the printer setup dialog. With a PRS file and the method VPE.SetupPrinter() you can automate to enable this option always (see manual / help files).

Using a modern HP PCL printer driver should fix the problem also.

Regards
Thorsten Radde
IDEAL Software GmbH