keie@star.UUCP (06/02/87)
We have used the Agfa-Gevaert P400 Printer for almost two years now. It is a extremely reliable, reasonably fast 400DPI printer. On which we printed about 170.000 pages so far. The speed is about 20ppm for plain text and 4ppm for troff output. Our configuration includes two text channels, a line channel, 2Mb main memory, a 10Mb winchester and some 6 proportional font families. We have modified the ditroff package and written a troff backend for the machine which allows the full use of eqn and tbl. Use of PIC is practically impossible. The resulting output is of a high quality. The printers command language is old-fashioned and developed by Agfa-Gevaert. It imposes a few limits on the output that makes a) the life of the backend-writer a continuing struggle, b) it impossible to print "Too Complex" pages. The typical "Too Complex" page consist for more than 60% of eqn output. We have a complaint like that about once a month. The machine was developed in Belgium and mainly marketed in Europe. Marketing it in the US ment redesigning the machine, thanks to all kinds of US electrical and FCC regulations. Currently AGFA offers a PostScript version of the beast, which is cheaper than our machine, has more (20 Mb) disk storage. I would love to play with that machine. Our version of ditroff, together with the P400 backend, is freely available to anyone with an academic ditroff license. All you have to do is send us a magnetic tape of at least 1200 feet. Ed Keizer keie@cs.vu.nl (...!mcvax!vu44!keie) Postal Address: Wiskundig Seminarium De Boelelaan 1081 1081 HV Amsterdam The Netherlands