laser-lovers@uw-beaver (12/07/84)
From: Robert McKay <RIM@SU-AI.ARPA>
Xeros themselves market a formatting package for the 8700/9700 (and if you
know to ask, for some other typesetters as well). Called XICS, it is
intended more for the person with some graphics arts background than
for the programmer, but is easy to use and more capable for general
publication (as opposed to technical pubs) than either TeX or SCRIBE.
It's expensive (~$50,000, but I suspect if you made purchase of a 9700
conditional on it......). Xerox have also just announced a VAX-based
interactive version, which will be intriguing to see how far it goes
in providing the best of both batch composition and WYSIWYG worlds.
Unfortunately, details have not yet reached us here in Australia, but
should be in the Seybold Report covering Graph-Expo.
PS a while ago, there were strong rumours here that Xerox were working
on a high res. version of the 9700. Anyone know anything more?
PPS 9700 rated speed is 120ppm for plain copy, but it's FAR slower
if you try to do very complex pages.
Cheers
Bob McKay