^C^1Review of Mannesmann Tally 910 Laser Printer
^Cby
^CDaniel Tobias

   The Mannesmann Tally 910 is a desktop laser printer.  This sort of printer is
used to produce output of a greater quality than that produced by dot-matrix
printers, with a wide selection of fonts, and graphics capabilities.  Laser
printer output can look nearly as professional as typeset material, especially
when you use a proportionally-spaced font (one in which letters are of different
width, rather than all the same like on typewritten text or a computer monitor).

   We received this model for review a couple of months ago, and it was placed
in my office.  Following the instructions in the manual, it didn't take long for
me to get it together, and I was ready to try running it.  The first time I
attempted to power it up, it gave the "Please Wait" sign (as it's supposed to),
but didn't seem to be "warming up" even after several minutes.  After I powered
it down and back up again, it worked fine, and the initial problem hasn't
recurred; either it was a fluke, or it's just a matter of "breaking it in."
From there I proceeded to run the built-in tests, such as printing out its
fonts, and they all worked fine.

   Next it was time to try hooking it up to a computer.  The Tally 910 is
available with either a parallel or a serial port as an option; they sent us one
with a parallel port.  This port isn't built in; the user must insert it into a
slot in the back, which is a simple matter of removing and replacing screws and
fitting a connector in place.  The first time I attempted this installation, the
contacts must not have made contact, since the computer's output wasn't reaching
the printer.  However, after removing and reinstalling it, it worked fine and
has continued functioning perfectly ever since.

   With the parallel port installed, I was ready to test it with a computer.  I
have an IBM PC and an Apple IIc, both of which have parallel printer ports
installed.  (Actually, the Apple has a serial port, but I've got a serial-to-
parallel adapter.)  I hooked one end of a printer cable to the Tally, and was
able to move the other end back and forth between the two computers depending on
which I was using at the time.

   On the IBM, I tried out various programs and DOS commands which generate
printouts, and they worked with the Tally.  There were a few peculiarities,
though; for instance, most standard dot-matrix printers use 66-line pages, while
the Tally's page has 64 lines under the standard 6-lpi (lines per inch) setting,
with the other two lines apparently making up a top and bottom margin.  Because
of this, page breaks often didn't come at the right place in documents formatted
for regular printers.  If formfeed characters were used, there would often be
one too many lines between formfeeds, causing an extra page to be output with a
single line on it in between regular pages; if, on the other hand, a document
was formatted with no formfeeds but "spaced out" for 66-line printers, then page
breaks would gradually creep their way down the middle of pages instead of
coming at the end of a page.  However, if a document is formatted with formfeeds
at the end of a page, and no more than 63 lines to a page (the 64th line's
closing linefeed will cause a blank page to be "spit out" in between pages),
then it prints out fine on the Tally.  The problem is that printout options in
many programs, as well as some preformatted documentation files, assume a 66-
line printer.  I believe this problem is common to all laser printers, not just
this one.  Due to the increase in popularity of laser printers, many newer
programs are specifically designed to produce properly-formatted printouts on
such printers, so this may prove not to be a problem for your applications.

   There are other possible choices for the lpi setting, but none of them
emulate a standard 66-line-per-page printer.  These and other settable options
can be chosen from an online menu through the panel buttons and a small LCD
display.  One of the choices you can select is what font to use; three fonts are
included, and more can be added through plug-in cartridges.  You can also choose
between several different sets of Escape-sequence commands for the Tally to
recognize, emulating a few popular printers.  Since I use PC-Write for most word
processing, I set the Tally to emulate an HP Laserjet Plus, and set up a PC-
Write printer configuration file as such.  Since then, I have done all of my
outgoing letters using the Tally.  It's really neat; since the Tally will take
any kind of paper, and has a choice of using a copier-style paper tray or a
manual feed, I just feed our letterhead paper into it, and out come typewriter-
quality letters very quickly.  (The manual feed does have a tendency to
incorrectly report a "paper jam" if the sheets are inserted even a millimeter to
the side of where the feeder expects them.)  I've been using the Courier font,
included with the Tally; it's a standard typewriter-style font.  The PC-Write
embedded commands for underline and overstrike work fine, but some other
commands like italic, double-wide, and bold have no effect or a different
effect, indicating that either such effects are not supported in this font, or
that PC-Write as presently configured can't handle them in the Tally's manner.

   If you want more professional-looking output, you'll want to use the
proportionally-spaced fonts.  I tried them out and they worked, but if you print
a standard ASCII document formatted for 80-column text in such a font, the line
lengths will work out unevenly and will be much too short on the average.
That's not the Tally's fault; it's inevitable with proportionally-spaced type on
any system.  You need a program to calculate line lengths and determine the
right place to put a line break, and I don't have one at the moment on the IBM.
(We do our inhouse desktop publishing on Macintosh systems using an Apple
LaserWriter printer.)

   The Tally also has graphics capabilities; using the GRAPHICS.COM graphics
dump program, it is possible to print out a graphics screen.  Of course, the
resolution of CGA graphics is much coarser than that of the laser printer, so
pictures look very jagged and lumpy.

   I then moved on to try the Tally out with the Apple computer.  Here, I had an
additional difficulty.  It seems that the Apple hardware setup I have likes to
send characters out its port with the high bits set, giving them ASCII codes in
the range of 128 to 255 rather than 0 to 127.  Many printers, including the
Tally, interpret such characters as special characters.  So, when I attempted to
output some text, I got all the letters in italics, and the space bar came out
as an "Undefined Character" (in a message on the LCD screen) and was ignored
altogether.  After some research in the manual, I found an escape sequence that
supposedly caused the high bit of incoming characters to be cleared, but even
after sending this sequence to the Tally, I couldn't get text to print out.
Perhaps it didn't recognize the escape command sequence because its high bit was
set; if so, that's a "Catch-22" situation with no way out.  It would have been
helpful if high-bit-handling were provided as an option on the built-in menu so
you can configure it for your system.  However, I ultimately found a
configuration program to run on the Apple which instructs the port not to set
the high bit in the first place; once this was done, there was no problem using
the Tally as an Apple printer.  However, it is necessary to boot the Apple from
a specially-configured disk to set this option, before doing any printouts.

   In closing, despite a few minor difficulties (mostly attributable to being a
user accustomed to dot-matrix printers trying a laser printer for the first
time), I found the Mannesmann Tally 910 laser printer to be very useful, and
I'll miss having it on my desk.  For my outgoing mail, it produced nice-looking
letters quickly and easily, on standard letterhead paper.  (Now I'll have to go
back to the bothersome, ugly tractor-feed letterheads for my dot-matrix
printer.)  It handled most other printout jobs I needed, though there were some
problems noted above regarding page length.  As for desktop publishing, one of
the most popular applications for laser printers, I can't really answer for the
Tally's applicability, since I don't do it.
