laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/05/85)
From: Ken Mandelberg <km%emory.csnet-relay.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Does anyone know the details of how to supplement the
postscript file made by Macintosh application programs
so that they can be printed independently of appletalk.
We run our laserwriter off of Unix using Adobe's Transcript
software (which runs very nicely by the way). My plan is
to macput the postscript file generated on the Mac down
to Unix, and spool it from there.
However, the postscript file produced by the applications
is not standalone, and requires that the laserwriter be
fed some definitions before hand. My understanding is that
these definitions are in the "Laserprep" resource file on
the Mac, but so far I have not made much sense of what I
can peek at in there.
Any help would be appreciated. In particular is it reasonable
to assume the added definitons are fixed, or is it possible
that they are application dependent (or worse yet document
dependent)?
Ken Mandelberg
Emory University
Dept of Math and CS
Atlanta, Ga 30322
{akgua,sb1,gatech,decvax}!emory!km USENET
km@emory CSNET
km.emory@csnet-relay ARPANETlaser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/06/85)
From: Brian Reid <reid@su-glacier.arpa> There are two different ways that a Mac application program can talk to the LaserWriter. The obvious way is for it to generate PostScript directly; those files do not normally require a header. If an application program does not do anything special, it outputs to the LaserWriter by generating a file that has the syntax of PostScript but the semantics of Apple QuickDraw. In other words, it is a PostScript file that consists of a series of calls on user-defined operators, and each of those operators corresponds to some QuickDraw function. While this scheme can work with no cooperation on the part of the application, it does not produce the most satisfactory results because the semantics of QuickDraw are reasonably device-dependent, and the computation that the LaserWriter needs to perform to emulate them at a pixel resolution that is not an integer multiple of the screen resolution can be substantial. There is a header file (that gets downloaded into the LaserWriter as part of its initialization sequence) that defines all of the operators that are needed for QuickDraw emulation. It is not application-dependent, and it is site-dependent only in that it contains the server loop exit password for the LaserWriter, so if you have changed the password on your LaserWriter from the default password of 0000000, you will have to edit the header file to reflect that new password (the server loop password is the first 7 characters of the file). It would be a fairly simple matter to modify that header file so that it could be used as a genuine prefix to each file that is printed, rather than being downloaded into the printer outside of the server loop (where it will stay until the printer is rebooted). I am enquiring as to whether or not the contents of this header file are proprietary to either Apple or Adobe. I can't imagine that they are proprietary, but I want to check anyhow. If the file is not proprietary I will happily send a copy of it out to the net (it is 40K characters, of which 19K are the actual definitions and the rest are comments and documentation that should be stripped from it before you actually use it.) Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA