Emeryville, California-based Insight Development Corp is now shipping DeskPlotter II, a special version of its PrintAPlot product that enables Hewlett-Packard Co’s new DeskJet 550C inkjet printer to be used as a high-performance, high-resolution black and full colour pen plotter. The DeskJet 550C, introduced last month, is a 300 dpi plain paper colour printer. It can use standard, legal or A4 size paper, and features carriage slots that hold two print cartridges – one black, one colour simultaneously. Its dual cartridges enables merged text and colourgraphics pages to print up to four times faster than on an HP DeskJet 500C printer and more than 20 times faster than a plotter. DeskPlotter II is an MS-DOS-resident software translation product that enables the DeskJet 550C to emulate several conventional pen plotters. DeskPlotter II enables software applications using the Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language, such as AutoCAD, Cadkey, Microstation, VersaCAD, Lotus 1-2-3 and virtually any MS-DOS based design, spreadsheet or graphics program, to work directly with the DeskJet 550C printer. Professional quality output ranging from computer-aided design and engineering applications to business presentation software can be produced with DeskPlotter II. In addition to providing an extensive selection of pen widths, shading and setting sheet retention options, the package offers extended scaling, image rotation and A to E size plotting with its tiling feature. It also includes an extremely small memory-resident option that takes up 1.3Kb of RAM. This enables users to pop up DeskPlotter II over their existing application without exiting and restarting. DeskPlotter II can print to a Novell Inc NetWare print queue and can batch print overnight if required. It costs $100 and is available directly from Insight Development.
