DRF@SU-SCORE.ARPA (David Fuchs) (01/15/86)
The Xerox 2700 is a well-known disaster area. It is unusable as anything other than a line-printer or daisy-wheel replacement. If whoever sold it to you represented it as otherwise, perhaps you can get them to give you a refund if you threaten to sue for fraud. The only thing more amazing than the fact that it was ever marketed is that many people actually purchased the thing. Specifically, the main problems are: 1) Xerox does not provide users with the font format, so to download fonts requires reverse-engineering the thing. But even if you do... 2) There's not enough room to hold as many different characters as you would typically find in a reasonable mix of jobs, but that doesn't even matter, because... 3) There isn't enough flexibility in the control electronics to place characters where you want them on the page if you're doing anything so common as trying to have a different amount of space between words on different lines of text. No other laser printer that costs even half as much has any of these problems, except the DEC LN01, which is actually (almost) the same machine. (In fact, I am aware of LN01 users that DEC has offered refunds to; DEC's LN03 machine is ok.) -david "who is frustrated by the number of people who call up and say `We just got our 2700, now how do we get TeX output?' and has to gently tell them they're fools." -------
BLARSON%ECLD@USC-ECL.ARPA (Bob Larson) (01/17/86)
>From: David Fuchs <DRF@SU-SCORE.ARPA> >The Xerox 2700 is a well-known disaster area. It is unusable as >anything other than a line-printer or daisy-wheel replacement. This is a bit of an exaggeration. (but not much) Scribe does manage to handle the beasties. > >1) Xerox does not provide users with the font format, so to download > fonts requires reverse-engineering the thing. But even if you do... True. There was a good start posted to laser-lovers. > >2) There's not enough room to hold as many different characters as you > would typically find in a reasonable mix of jobs, but that doesn't > even matter, because... Also true, but you can load and unload fonts between pages. > >3) There isn't enough flexibility in the control electronics to place > characters where you want them on the page if you're doing anything > so common as trying to have a different amount of space between > words on different lines of text. Almost true. Scribe gets around the problem by having a font of various sizes of spaces. As far as I know, this font is only available as part of scribe. > >No other laser printer that costs even half as much has any of these >problems, except the DEC LN01, which is actually (almost) the same >machine. (In fact, I am aware of LN01 users that DEC has offered >refunds to; DEC's LN03 machine is ok.) I can't really compare the 2700 to others, I haven't done anything significant with anything else. Remember the 2700 is an old design of a laser printer, I don't think there was anything available for half the price when it came out. > > -david "who is frustrated by the number of people who call up > and say `We just got our 2700, now how do we get TeX > output?' and has to gently tell them they're fools." We've had a bunch of 2700s for a couple of years, now how do we get TeX output? :-) -Bob Larson "who is frustrated trying to convince a Prime that not all printers are dumb line printers." Arpa: Blarson@Usc-Ecl.Arpa Uucp: ihnp4!sdcrdcf!oberon!blarson -------
DRF@SU-SCORE.ARPA (David Fuchs) (01/17/86)
Sorry, but excusing the 2700 based on how long it's been out is simply not historically accurate. Imagen was delivering systems many months before the 2700, and QMS came out at around the same time. Neither the QMS nor the Imagen was hobbled the way the 2700 was. "No other laser printer that costs even half as much has any of these problems" of course meant "...that costs as little as half as much..." I didn't want anyone to think I was talking about the various cheap-o daisy-wheel replacement laser printers that are now available. The point was that QMS and Imagen printers cost about the same amount back then as the 2700, and nowadays DEC and Apple and HP and QMS and Imagen and &c. all have good printers at as little as half the price of a 2700. The hack of using a font with a number of different space characters of various widths doesn't really solve the 2700 problem, since the limit of number of characters that can appear on a page is so severe that you find that you can't use enough of them to position the visible characters properly. Scribe can handle the 2700 because Scribe was designed to also be able to cope with line printers and daisy-wheel printers. Scribe knows ahead of time that its output is headed for a less-flexible output device, and adjusts spacing accordingly. Scribe ouput on the 2700 just isn't as nicely spaced as on other laser printers. There are some folks who manage to distort TeX output sufficiently so that it (sometimes) can be printed on the 2700, but it's not a pretty sight. So I stand by my previous flame. And if you want to get TeX output from your Prime, you might start by fixing the Pascal compiler... -david -------
elwell@OHIO-STATE.CSNET ("Clayton M. Elwell") (01/17/86)
Granted, A Xerox 2700 is Not The Right Way to print TeX output (for the uninformed, think of a mediocre 12 ppm office copier with a small diskless IBM PC as a controller [8086, 256K]). Here at OSU we have TeX support for the 2700 model II on both a DecSystem-20 (written in WEB) and 4.2bsd UNIX (in C). It will print most LaTeX and TeX documents, including ones with lots of math. The biggest two limitations are: 1) The 2700 is S...L...O...W when it loads fonts. We're talking many minutes here. 2) Fonts only go up to magstep 4. For more information, send mail to osu-eddie!gourlay. Note: our distribution does not include any Xerox proprietary information; we provide the fonts already converted to 2700 format.
laser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP (01/19/86)
In article <12175361911.19.DRF@SU-SCORE.ARPA> is an article from: > -david "who is frustrated by the number of people who call up > and say `We just got our 2700, now how do we get TeX > output?' and has to gently tell them they're fools." The author's mailing address got lost, so I'm sending to the list; sorry. >------- >The Xerox 2700 is a well-known disaster area. True, especially if you buy it as a DEC LN-01! >It is unusable as anything other than a line-printer or daisy-wheel replacement. This is not true, at least for the 2700 model II. > >1) Xerox does not provide users with the font format, so to download > fonts requires reverse-engineering the thing. But even if you do... It's available, if you're interested enough to pay the money for their training courses, and willing to sign ugly non-disclosure agreements; the only people I know who've done so are vendors of typesetting software packages. This also affects the 9700.. >..... >3) There isn't enough flexibility in the control electronics to place > characters where you want them on the page if you're doing anything > so common as trying to have a different amount of space between > words on different lines of text. We get fairly good troff output using some unexciting software from Image Network; I'm more impressed with Textware International's troff products but we knew someone who already had dealt with Image Network, so it was more convenient for our purchasing lawyers. I don't know if anybody's ported TeX yet. This is commercial software, and costs non-trivial money, but the printer can do useful things. > >[More flames about the 2700 .... DEC LN01 ...] >; DEC's LN03 machine is ok.) It's fairly well-documented, but looks ugly to do much more than line-printer and DEC-compatible graphics on. -- # Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G-202, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs
laser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP (01/19/86)
In article <12175361911.19.DRF@SU-SCORE.ARPA> DRF@SU-SCORE.ARPA (David Fuchs) writes: >The Xerox 2700 is a well-known disaster area. It is unusable as >anything other than a line-printer or daisy-wheel replacement. If >whoever sold it to you represented it as otherwise, perhaps you can >get them to give you a refund if you threaten to sue for fraud. The >only thing more amazing than the fact that it was ever marketed is >that many people actually purchased the thing. I agree that there are more capable laser-printers around now, but I feel that David is stating the case against the 2700 a bit too strongly. We have been using the 2700 here for several years. We typically print 30 to 40 thousand pages of typeset (ditroff) documentation per month. Our documents contain tbl, eqn, pic, and grap displays. It's the rare case that hits the 2700's complexity/capacity boundries, not the rule. We use a postprocessor from Voelker-Lehman Systems in Fremont, CA. VLS has solved most of the problems you mentioned. If you have a Xerox 2700 printer (or X3700, or X4045, or HP Laserjet), and need to be able to produce typeset documents with troff, I suggest that you give them a call [(415)490-3555 - talk to Michael Sweeney]. BTW, Xerox has just released a firmware upgrade for the X2700. It's a cartridge called "GraphX" that gives the 2700 a much broader command set. It gives the 2700 a very GKS-like command set for drawing arbitrary vectors, poly-lines, circles, region-fill, etc., as well as the capabillity to accept and print raster data. Larry Auton bonnie!lda Disclamer: The opinions expressed above are my own and do not necessarily represent the opinions of AT&T, VLS, HP, or Xerox. --
phil@RICE.EDU (William LeFebvre) (01/21/86)
> 3) There isn't enough flexibility in the control electronics to place > characters where you want them on the page if you're doing anything > so common as trying to have a different amount of space between > words on different lines of text. > The hack of using a font with a number of different space characters > of various widths doesn't really solve the 2700 problem, since the > limit of number of characters that can appear on a page is so severe > that you find that you can't use enough of them to position the > visible characters properly. To be fair, the 2700 model II has relative horizontal commands that make the varying width space characters unnecessary. It was necessary to pull that trick with the original 2700 model I. HOWEVER: I agree 100% with David on this. The 2700 is not worth the money or the frustration. I have refrained from being critical about this machine, because of certain personal matters. But perhaps the criticism is important to keep people from making a large mistake. There is no excuse for the size limitations and language restrictions imposed by the 2700. Absolutely no excuse at all. It makes doing anything real so hard that it isn't worth the effort. Image Network's software (I'm pretty sure) works by downloading one or more fonts per job that have exactly the right characters in it to print the job. Naturally, this requires software that knows the font format. The only other alternative is to download one 2700 "font" for every typeface required by the document. TeX relies heavily on the ability to use lots of different fonts. It would not be all that hard to hit the limit of 10 (yes *TEN*) fonts per "job". Now, even if you use the trick of breaking a document up into several "jobs", you can still only load 10 (yes *TEN*) fonts PER PAGE! Remember that a 2700 "font" is really just a specific face at a specific size (i.e.: roman at 10 point). That is a very unreasonable restriction, and one that makes TeX tricky. One is pretty much forced to resort to the "Image Network" hack of building special fonts with just the characters you need. Of course, there are also restictions on the size of a particular font, and the total amount of space used by all the fonts. Don't be fooled, the 2700 is not much better than a fast line printer. Interpress printers, on the other hand..... William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University <phil@Rice.edu> DISCLAIMER: the opinions expressed in this message are completely mine and no one else's.