paul@cgh.UUCP (Paul Homchick) (07/03/88)
In article <5137@dasys1.UUCP> tbetz@dasys1.UUCP (Tom Betz) writes: >Last night on the local Personal Computer Show on WBAI-FM, I heard a report >of a product introduced this week at PC-Expo in NYC that provides the same >functionality as JetScript for a laserprinter, but is a totally software >solution, and was selling at the Expo for $195! I didn't catch the name of >the product... perhaps someone else The product is called GoScript, from LaserGo in San Diego. LaserGo can be contacted at (619) 530-2400. I bought a copy at PC-EXPO and talked to the programmer for a bit. He said that GoScript was developed using Turbo C and MASM. GoScript will take a postscript file and converts it to a bit image for a variety of printers, including the Laserjet, Deskjet, and Epson FX and LQ dot matrix printers. GoScript comes with thirteen Bitstream Postscript outline fonts, making up three styles (Dutch, Swiss and Courier in normal, bold and italic as well as Symbol). It is not fast, but it takes advantage of expanded memory and a numeric processor if present to speed things along. The speed penalty is not at all surprising considering the magnitude of the job. For a test, I took a Ventura Publisher postscript output file and fed it to GoScript. The Ventura document was a complex expense voucher, originally developed and printed on a NEC LC-890 postscript laser printer. The document had different-width lines all over the place, and a variety of Helvetica normal and bold fonts. The input postscript file from Ventura was over 19K, which, after about 30 minutes of processing on an AT&T 6386 WGS running VP/ix under UNIX/386, produced an 880K output bit-map file. When I sent this to my HP Laserjet Series II, out came the expense voucher. The program obviously does what it claims; it is a full postscript interpreter (only missing a few fonts which you can purchase and add). I'm not going to claim that it is perfect, tho. It takes a great deal of memory and time to pull off this trick. I can't run it on my network, because the 450K left after loading the client software doesn't leave enough for GoScript. And 30 minutes for processing one page (a complex one, less complex pages take only a few minutes) is longer than an apple laserwriter would take, but $200 is also a lot less than the $4,000 cost of a postscript printer. You give up some time, and save a lot of money, and you get the large range of font-scaling and graphics abilities of postscript. LaserGo also has a board that allows the use of expanded ram as printer memory and interfaces directly with the printer engine, bypassing the normal interface. This $350 board does speed things up, as the demos I saw at PC-EXPO using this set-up were much faster than what I am able to achieve on my own equipment. A user on GEnie (Roland Racko) has reported some bugs, and says the current version (1.0): "... [is] a bit fragile.. [with] system hangs, [and] gratuitous bombs. It is a bit exasperating, because when it works it handles some amazingly complicated postscript. when it fails if gives no clue why. sometimes i think it goes into loops, because i wait an hour...... and nothing. some probelms with setgray operator. was able to create a Bitstream Cooper Black that it took with no problem and that was a very complex file, so it is on again off again. be warned you need about 3 megs of available disk space what with font files, temp save areas and such. you can use less but you have to work at it. they have a BBS to leave bugs on and seem attentative to it. bug samples have been forwarded to vendor and they agree with some of them. [...] an interesting product to keep eyes on." If you need to be able to produce an occasional postscript file on a non-postscript printer, I'd recommend taking a look at this. -- Paul Homchick {allegra | rutgers | uunet} !cbmvax!cgh!paul Chimitt Gilman Homchick, Inc.; One Radnor Station, Suite 300; Radnor, PA 19087