cyrus@hi.UUCP (05/08/87)
When is someone going to make a postscript printer that sits on
the ethernet? As far as I know, current postscript printers
sit on a RS232 port. This is slowwwwwwwww. The ONLY reason
that we are not going to postscript is because of the large
amounts of time required to get a job printed, especially if
it is a bitmap. We currently have an Imagen 8/300 which is
about to die (just the other day we printed ~1500 pages in a
12 hour time period, far more than it was designed for) and
we will have to buy another laser printer. If there were a
postscript printer that set on the ethernet, it would
probably be purchased just because there are a lot more
products that produce postscript than there are that produce
impress.
So back to the original question, when are postscript printers
that sit on the ethernet coming out?
--
@__________@ W. Tait Cyrus (505) 277-0806
/| /| University of New Mexico
/ | / | Dept of EECE - Hypercube Project
@__|_______@ | Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131
| | | |
| | hc | | e-mail:
| @.......|..@ cyrus@hc.dspo.gov or cyrus@hc.arpa or
| / | / {gatech|ucbvax|convex}!unmvax!hi!cyrus
@/_________@/greenber@swatsun (Peter Greenberg) (05/09/87)
In article <6310@hi.UUCP>, cyrus@hi.UUCP (Tait Cyrus) writes: > When is someone going to make a postscript printer that sits on > the ethernet? As far as I know, current postscript printers > sit on a RS232 port. This is slowwwwwwwww. [ complaint follows about slow bitmap printing ] I think that the time problem is primarily in PostScript, which because it is a full programming language interpreter is not blindingly fast. The problem with the bitmap is that PostScript has to figure out how to half-tone your image, amongst other stuff, like positioning. A one megabyte bitmap will take at most 2 minutes to get there continuously at 9600 baud, but the whole process will take about 5 or 10 minutes. Evidently, computaion takes more time than communication. Also, I think that PS reads tokens off its input stream as it goes along, rather than waiting for the whole file to come down first (it uses some protocol to tell the host that its buffers are full or not, like XON-XOFF). So, I think it is CPU bound and not I/O bound, but I wish some PS or LaserWriter guru could enlighten me and the rest of this board. -- Peter Greenberg, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081 AT&T:(215) 328-8384 or 8610 UUCP: ...{{seismo | inhp4}!bpa | {sun | rutgers}!liberty}!swatsun!greenber ARPA: swatsun!greenber@bpa.BELL-ATL.COM
cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) (05/13/87)
> When is someone going to make a postscript printer that sits on > the ethernet? As far as I know, current postscript printers > sit on a RS232 port. This is slowwwwwwwww. The ONLY reason > that we are not going to postscript is because of the large > amounts of time required to get a job printed, especially if > it is a bitmap. We currently have an Imagen 8/300 which is > about to die (just the other day we printed ~1500 pages in a > 12 hour time period, far more than it was designed for) and > we will have to buy another laser printer. If there were a > postscript printer that set on the ethernet, it would > probably be purchased just because there are a lot more > products that produce postscript than there are that produce > impress. > > So back to the original question, when are postscript printers > that sit on the ethernet coming out? > When PostScript runs fast enough to justify a faster input. Seriously, an Apple LaserWriter will bog down enough at 9600 baud to make higher speed inputs seem hard to justify. The LaserWriter Plus is faster, but even then, the limiting factor is frequently how fast PostScript can process the input. By the way, using a PostScript printer to put out bit mapped graphics data is a very poor use of PostScript. I have a program that takes Epson MX-80 graphics data, and translates it into PostScript -- it's really painful to watch a full page of graphics convert to PostScript and print. It makes more sense to figure out how to convert the data that generated the bit map into something a little more oriented to PostScript. Clayton E. Cramer
trevor@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Trevor Darrell) (05/14/87)
In article <1579@kontron.UUCP> cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes: >> So back to the original question, when are postscript printers >> that sit on the ethernet coming out? >> >When PostScript runs fast enough to justify a faster input. > >Seriously, an Apple LaserWriter will bog down enough at 9600 baud to >make higher speed inputs seem hard to justify. The LaserWriter Plus >is faster, but even then, the limiting factor is frequently how fast >PostScript can process the input. > Maybe for *your* applications, but for us 9600 baud is the limiting factor much of the time. You should not be so presumptous about the nature of the data being sent: try sending a 512 x 512 x 8 bit image at 9600 baud! TeX ouput that uses DVI bitmaps rather than the built in PostScript fonts is also frequently transmission-bound rather than compute bound. Trevor Darrell trevor@linc.cis.upenn.edu