ZENOGRAPHICS TO SHIP SUPERPRINT 2.0 ----------------------------------- Fastest text printing, super fast screen fonts plus complete "Postscript 35" fonts Irvine, California - Zenographics announced today that it will begin shipping SuperPrint 2.0 on May 20, 1991. This major up-grade creates LaserJet soft fonts on-the-fly at print time and downloads them to the printer, producing output 2 to 5 times faster than ATM or Facelift on LaserJet-compatible printers for all major document categories: text, spreadsheets, DTP and graphics. The new release also produces dramatically faster on-the-fly screen fonts. SuperPrint now matches or exceeds the screen font performance of ATM and Facelift, while providing vastly superior text and graphics printing speed. Other important enhancements in this new version include: * The entire PostScript-compatible set of 35 typefaces - making SuperPrint the first software printing solution to offer the complete "PostScript 35" in the base product. Bitstream Charter is also included, bringing SuperPrint's total to 36. * Output drivers so any Windows application can create TIFF, Targa, and BMP bitmap formats in both color and black & white. * Convenient connectivity between the Standard SuperPrint and SuperPrint versions for high-end color devices, such as Agfa Matrix film recorders or Canon Color Laser Copiers, through the use of 'SuperMetafile" page description files. Faster Text Printing Thousands of LaserJet and compatible printers users have found SuperPrint to be the fastest-printing solution for graphics applications such as Corel Systems CorelDRAW!, Micrografx Designer, and Microsoft PowerPoint. They have also benefitted from SuperPrint's open-architecture typeface system and efficient high-speed background printing. Their only additional wish has been for faster text printing. Zenographics has now obliged them, thanks to a new "region analysis" feature in SuperPrint: This process examines a page as it comes from the application and determines which areas are pure text and which are graphics. Pure text is handled in the manner for which LaserJet printers are optimized; the needed characters are downloaded as soft fonts, then printed using simple text calls. Only the characters used on the current page are downloaded. What's more, for subsequent pages in the same document, only the new characters need to be downloaded, so these pages print even faster. In fact, for a typical multi-page, text-only document, SuperPrint 2.0 is able to feed LaserJet printers at their rated page-printing speed. This makes SuperPrint 2.0 faster at printing scalable text than either Adobe Type Manager or Bitstream Facelift, as shown in the attached chart. Graphics regions are still rasterized using Zenographics' proven SoftRIP rasterizer, and only graphics areas are sent as raster data. SuperPrint automatically uses a PostScript-like imaging model, so that even reversed-out text (white on black), gray text and text mixed with graphics can be successfully imaged alongside downloaded fonts. An added benefit from this new printing architecture is that many pages which previously required 1 megabyte of printer memory will now print in just 512K. Selectable Font Caching SuperPrint now provides a user-selectable option for memory-based font caching which speeds up on-the-fly screen font generation. SuperPrint creates only the characters being used, one at a time, instead of generating an entire character set every time a new font is requested. New screen fonts now appear virtually instantaneously. This new option produces screen font performance equivalent to or better than that of ATM. Windows Bugs Overcome SuperPrint 2.O's new screen font mechanism overcomes a Windows 3.O bug which prevented SuperPrint 1.1 from displaying large font sizes correctly under Windows enhanced mode. SuperPrint also overcomes a Windows character display problem. Standard Windows screen drivers clip any portion of a character outside of a font's designated "set width." SuperPrint 2.0 displays each character in its entirety, including those portions which extend above and beyond the set width. New SuperMetafile Drivers The new Standard SuperPrint 2.O also includes 'SuperMetafile" drivers for all the high-end color devices currently supported by special versions of SuperPrint. These drivers do not allow users to print directly to high-end devices, but they can generate page description files for use at remotely-situated color devices (such as a Matrix film recorder at a service bureau or a CalComp color printer on a network). This connectivity feature lets Standard SuperPrint-equipped computers act as inexpensive graphics workstations, feeding their output to a shared color device. With its newly acquired LaserJet text printing technology and faster screen font generation, SuperPrint is now the fastest-printing font manager software for mainstream word processor and spreadsheet users as well as users of graphics-intensive applications. Upgrade Policy Registered users of earlier versions of SuperPrint can upgrade to version 2.0 for $50 until July 31, 1991. Thereafter, the upgrade price will be $75. SuperPrint is available from distributors such as Merisel and Ingram-Micro D, and leading retailers such as Egghead Discount Software. For more information, please contact Zenographics at (714) 851-6352.