adrian@ru-cs44.UUCP (Adrian Pell) (07/22/83)
Thanks to all the people who replied to my question on usage of Versatec printer/plotters. Credits at the end. Here's a summary: 1) What software do you use? The general standard seems to be vtroff (from Berkeley, see below), which is a postprocessor for troff. Other software used it [dt]itroff, the device-independent typesetter package of Kernighan, vplot, pic, ideal, DIGS (Device Independent Graphics System). 2) Who supplies it? Vtroff comes from Berkeley in the 4.xBSD distributions, although not in the 2.xBSD distributions (why?). It's reputed to be available from Tom Ferrin at UC San Francisco (ucbvax!ucsfcgl!tef), for the 11's. (Tom, are you out there?) Vplot is in Berkely or SIII; pic, ideal and [dt]itroff are available (maybe) from AT&T; DIGS comes from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland - no details of availability. 3) Will it fit on a PDP11/44? It seems that it will - well most of it. Vtroff and vplot are known to be working on I?D 11's. Some bits of the rest are too. 4) How much of a drain on the system is it? If you have a lightly loaded 780, not a lot. A bit more on the smaller CPU's! Vtroff generates a lot of output (figures of .5-1 MB per foot have been mentioned), and if you can't generate it fast enough to drive the printer direct you'll need some (large) temporary file space. (The Versatec needs to be kept moving, otherwise black lines result). Suggestions that vtroff is about double the load of troff which is about double the load of nroff seem to be sustained. 5) Reliability? Opinions on reliability seem very subjective. It probably depends on how good your engineer is, or whether the animal was made on a Friday afternoon, ... There are bad experiences: lack of intensity, slipping paper, power supplies burning out; but there are also good experiences. You take your choice. Thanks to: vax135!ukc!root44!pdl philabs!mcvax!jaap philabs!mcvax!teus ihnp4!kpno!downey decwrl!qubix!msc duke!dbl decwrl!turtlevax!ken utcsstat!laura vax135!edcaad!edmrc!jimp utcsstat!geoff harpo!presby!burdvax!puder ucbvax!UCBERNIE:carl for taking the trouble to reply. Adrian Pell ({vax135,mcvax}!ukc!ru-cs44!adrian) Dept of Computer Science University of Reading England