laser-lovers@uw-beaver.UUCP (02/08/84)
From shel@ima!cfib.UUCP Tue Feb 7 20:21:12 1984
The Xerox 8700 is a high quality (300 dpi), high volume (.7sec/page)
laser printer designed for print production enviornments capable
of printing over 750K pages per month. When you purchase the printer
Xerox supplies virtually no software to use it in ways other than a
basic line printer with a forms overlay facility. Even though a
large variety of fonts are available, you cannot do typeset types
of work without additional software. Xerox tries to sell you
their own formatting package XICS for about $50,000. With XICS
you can take advantage of the capability of the 8700. You can also
purchase one of a very few other commercial packages which take
advantage of the 8700 (Scribe) with similar prices.
We were already heavily committed to N/Troff and did not want to
convert all of our text applications to another text processor. We
contracted with a local Boston firm, Textware, to develop a troff
Textware had already done a number of troff post processors for
a variety of typesetters, terminals, and printers and felt after a
review of the 8700 (and a trip to California to speak directly with
Xerox) that he could do the job. We had worked with Brent Byer, Textware's
president on some previous typesetting projects and since we were pleased
with his other work, contracted with him for the 8700 backend.
The project was a major success. We have the full range
of troff facilities open to us. We utilize troff to typeset our documents
pass the output through Brent's post processor put the resultant file
on a tape (using a variation of a ANSI tape writer) and print on the 8700.
We are able to change fonts, use bold, italics, draw lines, boxes and
anything else you would want to do with a typesetter. We usually
use tbl to format the tables in our reports, pipe the output through troff
and the entire combination works perfectly.
As an example we can take any of the unix manuals, simply give the command:
tbl /usr/man/man1/csh.1 |troff -man|postprocessor >doc.087
and produce perfect copies of the manuals without any changes to
the original document.
The 8700 postprocessor is available for sale to other 87/9700 UNIX sites
from Textware. In addition, they have a similar post processor in the works
for the Xerox 2700, and terminal previewers for a bit mapped terminal. They
also typeset from troff documents.
You can reach Brent Byer at
Textware International
PO Box 14
Harvard Square Station
Cambridge, MA 02238
617-UNI-TEXT
Sheldon Laube, The Consumer Financial Institute, Boston, MA 617-969-2632
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