laser-lovers@uw-beaver (01/25/85)
From: Richard Furuta <Furuta@washington.arpa> I called Adobe this afternoon to try and get the current word on Postscript and Postscript-related products. I spoke with Rob Auster there. Adobe is announcing today at Uniform a software product called transcript. This is a 4.2 bsd Unix program that translates from various other formats into Postscript and that drives the printer. It accepts output produced by ditroff, troff (CAT/GSI format), chart (whatever that is), and postscript files produced by other sources. It will also accept Diablo 630 format files and simple text. Transcript drives the printer over a RS232 link and handles error status, accounting, and other details. The cost is $495 for binary and $1795 for source. Adobe, itself, is marketing this. Unilogic is providing Scribe support for Postscript (and note again that transcript handles the troff CAT/GSI format which Scribe also produces). TeX support is being prepared by Textset (more on this later). QMS is supposed to be shipping their 1200A although they haven't announced it yet. This is the QMS 1200 with Adobe's interface rather than with the QMS interface. (The 1200 is based on the Xerox XP-12 print engine.) It is supposed to be "completely compatible" with the Apple printer in terms of what it'll accept. An Adobe interface to some Merganthaler phototypesetters is scheduled for announcement tomorrow. This provides printers with 600dpi, 1200dpi, and 2500dpi resolutions. The claim is that by the end of the year there will be a range of Adobe products offering a variety of speeds, duty cycles, and resolutions. A number of further sets of Merganthaler fonts are scheduled for release through the year. The plan is that Apple will make them available on a Macintosh disk for a price in the $80 to $100 range. The disk will contain Macintosh screen fonts plus fonts for the printer. The printer's fonts will be downloaded into a 128 K buffer that has been reserved in the printer. The Apple printer has a switch on the side that selects the hardware interface. Available are AppleTalk (the Apple network), two RS232 interfaces (1200 baud and 9600 baud), and a straight Diablo interface. The Postscript manual is available from Adobe for $30. I also spoke with Jim Sterken of Textset. Textset has previously produced a TeX port on the Sun terminal and also an APS DVI device driver that runs on a number of operating systems (VMS, IBM CMS, IBM VM, Tops-20, Sun 4.2, and Apollo.) Sterken is in the middle of developing a DVI driver to Postscript. The plan here is that Adobe will put the CM fonts into the printer. Some of the final form of the driver will depend on whether all the CM fonts will fit or not. The goal is to have the driver ready for distribution by the time that the Apple printers become available in March. They haven't figured out how the marketing will be handled yet but the guess is that the cost will be in the $500 to $1000 range. The software is being developed on a Sun in WEB and it's expected that the software will be supported on a similar set of operating systems to that that they support for the APS. That's it for now. Anyone have additional information? --Rick -------
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (01/26/85)
From: Robert Morris <ram%vax2.uucp%umass-boston.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
re: making PostScript printers output CM fonts strikes me as
akin to making a Maserati (well, maybe a Porsche) masquerade
as a Volkswagen. PostScript has enough power to get back from
the PostScript engine sufficient metric information to in
turn build TeX font metrics and have TeX deal directly with
PostScript's native abilities.
People who want to circumvent Adobe font generation should
in my opinion have a good reason to do so, and CM sure
ain't such a reason (except, as above, if you want all
the cars in your garage to look like Volkswagen's). There
are reasons, some of which are presently the subject of
hot debate which only time and experiments will settle.
Adobe rasterizes on the fly and bitmaps are therefore
untuned. Some authorities claim you can not get the best
results on low-resolution devices when you rasterize on
the fly, but other's claim that the
Adobe results will satisfy all or most users. Another
problem arises when you have to match font widths for
two disparate devices, e.g. you have screen fonts which
are supposed to represent the printer fonts, but your
composition system uses the printer font metrics to
determine line breaks in order to get the best result
for the printer. If the screen font is, say, too wide
then the screen text will be overcrowded and you will judge
that the setting is bad(unless you look at the printed output).
Similarly one might imagine such a problem if one set with
typesetter metrics and used the laser printer as proof device.
Your judgment of the quality of the final setting will be
in error if the fonts are badly mismatched (it's harder
to match screen fonts to laser than laser to typesetter
because a 12 point screen font is only about 12 pixels high
and 6-10 wide at typical screen resolutions. hence the
artist(or rasterization algorithm)
has fewer pixels to push around to tune the fonts)
I have the impression that Adobe is prepared to offer
its customers (i.e. OEM's) screen fonts for typical
screens which solve this problem. Apple must have solved
it, or else either the Mac screens or the printed output
will look badly spaced (anyone seen a WYSIWYG application
with the Mac and Laserwriter?). I also have the
impression that Imagen is or will offer the corresponding
solution from Bigelow&Holmes for the Lucida fonts described
recently in this forum.
These being rather beautiful fonts whose outlines are
explicitly designed for laser printers, I would make the
same argument about a desire to use TeX with CM instead of
Lucida on an Imagen or whatever else you can get them on.
Your main motivation would have to be that you want your
new copies of the document to look as unsatisfactory as
your old ones. Imagen/Lucida and PostScript/{Times,Helvetica}
strike me as Porsche's in the garage.