laserwriters, fonts, toys, and hints...

[Chuq Von Rospach; Lord of the OtherRealms]

I'm about to buy a laserwriter for my own uses at home (OtherRealms is
going to turn into a nice, expensive hobby before I'm through) which
brings up all sorts of interesting questions that I thought I'd throw
out to the group mind.

First of all, am I going to have trouble hooking it up to my system? I'm
currently running a Paradise hard disk off of the printer port, an
Imagewriter/Thunderscan and a modem off of an A/B switch on the modem port.
Appletalk also plugs into the modem port, right? Does this mean I'm going
to have to go to an A/B/C/D switch, or is this going to a real hassle?
(note: since the LW can't do mailing labels, I can't completely retire the
Imagewriter, although the Thunderscan may be retired soon).

Question #2. How well in reality does bitmapped (i.e. MacPaint) art and
graphics reproduce? Am I (as an example) going to want to upgrade to
SuperPaint so I can do Postscript graphics? Has anyone played with the
new Postscript clip art starting to come out? Is SuperPaint better than
MacDraw? What are the tradeoffs?

Question #3. Does anyone know of a grahics librarian for PICT stuff?
Picturebase (?) does it for macpaint bitmap stuff, but not for macdraw
format graphics. Am I stuck with the Scrapbook for now?

Question #4. What are your favorite laser fonts? Now that I'm not going
to be limited to 72dpi, I want to pick up a few distinctive typefaces for
some of my stuff. I particularly would like to find a good London style
Old English font, if it exists. What other fonts are available, and
which ones do you like?

Question #5. What do you recommend for things like custom font/logo/graphic
design? If I want to develop my own font characters and dingbats, what
should I look at using, assuming I want PostScript and not bitmap
characters?

Question the last. With the laserwriter coming in, I'm thinking it would
be a Good Thing to start using honest letterhead instead of pinfeed with a
bitmap letterhead logo for stuff. Any suggestions on kinds of paper (also
colors and tints ) that work well in a laserwriter? What sort of thigns
should I plan on avoiding (textured papers, for instance...). Does the
printer have trouble with heavy (say 20lb) paper?

thanks for the help, in advance (this should get some interesting dicussion
going, I hope!)

chuq