laser-lovers@uw-beaver (02/17/85)
From: Neal Holtz <holtz%cascade.cdn%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> I have to make a decision very soon as to what laser printer to purchase (am willing to wait a while for full functionality, but the money will evaporate soon). I have not seen any careful analysis of how the LaserWriter and Postcript will handle TeX output. I have also not seen any Postscript documentation that might answer some of the following questions. I assume that over the short term, one would have to live with the standard TeX fonts, sent to the Laser as bitmaps with every document. This frightens me a bit as being quite slow (I know the Laserwriter is not a high-volume printer, but I don't think I would like to average 3 minutes a page). Does anyone have any guesses as to what the throughput might be for an "average" document? Is there anyway to send the bitmaps less frequently (e.g., can they also be cached and the host informed when they must be sent again)? I also assume that the TeX fonts, or more importantly, TeX-compatible fonts will reside in outline form on the LaserWriter. Any guesses as to when this might happen?
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (02/17/85)
From: Richard Furuta <Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA> My reading of the messages relating to PostScript and quick scans of the PostScript manual indicate that, on the short term, it should be possible to do font caching using PostScript procedures. In other words, it should be possible to send the bits associated with the character down only once and then subsequently refer to those stored bits. This is precisely the method that we use on our Symbolics LGP-1 which sits at the end of a 9600 baud line. The performance is certainly better than 3 pages per minute. I'd guess that the 9600 baud line limits us to an average speed of somewhere in the range of 5 to 8 pages per minute on the LGP-1 and so it certainly should be possible to drive the LaserWriter at close to full speed even if you have to send the character bitmaps down. There may be a more elegant way to get this job done in PostScript but my immediate feeling is that it is quite plausible, even without fonts available in the outline format. If the TeX fonts become available in the outline format, then the DVI driver will be quite trivial. Another question for Adobe---what are the plans for providing TeX fonts? --Rick -------