greenber@acf4.UUCP (ross m. greenberg) (01/25/85)
<>
I'm thinking of getting an HP LaserJet printer shortly (I got this really
good price, you see and.....).
I'll start by hooking it up to my PC, but I'm eventually gonna get a
3B, and I was wondering about using it as a real live public-domain/
semi-private bulletin board typesetting service.
What's involved in getting troff (and those of it's ilk!) to do decent
typesetting on it. I mean, if I download a page of pixels to it for
full typesetting/graphics at 9600 baud we are talking ALOT of time
per page:
300 dpi * 300 dpi * 8 * 11 = 7,920,000/9600 = 825 secs ~= 14 minutes
just for the dowload! There has to be an easier (and faster) and cheap
way of doing it. Anybody??
------------------------------------------------------
Ross M. Greenberg @ NYU ----> { allegra,ihnp4 }!cmcl2!acf4!greenber <----geller@rlgvax.UUCP (David Geller) (01/26/85)
> I'm thinking of getting an HP LaserJet printer shortly (I got this really > good price, you see and.....). > > 3B, and I was wondering about using it as a real live public-domain/ > semi-private bulletin board typesetting service. > > ...I mean, if I download a page of pixels to it for > full typesetting/graphics at 9600 baud we are talking ALOT of time > per page: > 1. I don't think that the HP Laserjet has any facilities for graphics and 2. I would think that some amount of careful consideration should taken before one embarked on such a venture. You have to consider all of the legal ramifications of taking responsibility for printing the data of other people. Just a thought... 3. There are ways to cut down on the amount of data transfered if you were to tackle such a problem. You could encode and compress the data or form a meta language of codes for graphics printing. Do away with straight byte dumps - too costly in time. Interpret the image and then send the directing for recreating the image to the printer. {seismo}!rlgvax!geller David P. Geller
johnl@ima.UUCP (01/27/85)
You can't download a page of 300dpi pixels to a LaserJet -- it doesn't have enough memory. There's room for a full page at 75dpi or correspondingly less at higher resolution. I have a little program that dumps my PC screen to a LaserJet at 100dpi, dumping each scan row twice since the LaserJet has square pixels and the PC's are about 2:1. Even that takes about 30 secs to dump the image to the printer. All is not lost, though. HP has a font cartridge with nice Times Roman fonts which we use for half-hearted typesetting (under FinalWord.) It also has a small times font for footnotes and superscripts, and a large sans-serif font for titles, as well as the built-in typewriter font. Any character can be printed at any position on the page, along with mixed-in 300dpi graphics subject to the graphics memory limitations. All in all, not a bad deal for three grand. John Levine, ima!johnl
knutson@ut-ngp.UUCP (Jim Knutson) (02/01/85)
First of all, the LaserJet can't do a full page at 300 dpi. It doesn't have the memory required to buffer all of that. I think the best I was able to come up with was 100 dpi. Second, I would not use the bitmap mode for typesetting unless forced. It just takes TOO long to print. The font cartridges would be the best way to go about it.
stewart@houxf.UUCP (Bill Stewart HO 4K-435 x0705) (02/11/85)
At least two companies make troff postprocessors for the Laser-Jet
printer. (By the way, they get discussed a lot in fa.laser-lovers,
which is also forwarded from an ARPAnet group). The one I know less
about is
Elan Computer Group - I don't have their address handy, but I
think they're in Los Altos, Ca. A person to contact is Ken Greer at
hplabs (he works there as a consultant). I saw a sample of their work
at Usenix, and it's pretty good.
Textware International, in Cambridge, Mass., produces a line of
troff postprocessors producing output for the Laser Jet, the Xerox
2700, *700 ... 9700, and probably other things. The person there is
Brent Byer. I don't have his login handy, but it's probably
{harvard or wjh12}!textware!bb. His software produces very high
quality output for the eqn equation program, boxed tables with boxes
that really line up, and sometime soon should be handling the pic
graphics stuff as well.
Both sets of software currently use the "B" font cartridge, which has
"Times" fonts in roman, bold, and italic 10-point, 8.5 point times,
14 point "Helvetica", as well as Courier 10-point, 8.5point, and
landscape 10-point. The raster memory is only 53K at 300 dots/inch,
which gives you about 6 square inches - it's really only useful for
equations and small amounts of graphics; most of the text is handled by
the builtin fonts. (Note that the Apple and Imagen printers based on
the Canon 8/300 engine provide tons of memory, but also cost more.)
Everyone is hoping that HP will come out with some downloadable RAM
font cartridges for use with user-supplied fonts, but don't hold your
breath.
If you want proper addresses for Textware or Elan, send me
mail. My usual address is {ihnp4, allegra, houxf}!ho95c!wcs.
Bill Stewart
--
Bill Stewart ho95c!wcs
AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
HO 4K-435 x0705 (201-949-0705)
allegra!ho95c!wcs
ucbvax!ihnp4!ho95c!wcs
decvax1harpo!ho95c!wcs