jsloan@wright.UUCP (03/04/87)
Does anyone have any suggestions about real, production, typesetters that understand Postscript, or perhaps have a frontend that understands postscript and perhaps even speaks TCP/IP? I guess the application is obvious: have one of these on the campus network for use by the media people. Faculty could submit jobs in troff or TeX form preprocessed into postscript. We might expect a Sun-like terminal to be attached so that print jobs could be previewed prior to being typeset, similar to what we do now with our Suns and our LaserWriter. Usual disclaimers: we don't know much about typesetting, we're the UNIX and networking folks here. The typesetting people have heard of computers and have said that their equipment understands ASCII as a page description language. Uh, yes, well... Also, sorry if this is a rehashed subject. If you respond to me my email, and there is some interest, I would be more than happy to summarize for the net. Thanks! -- John Sloan CSNET: jsloan@CS.Wright.EDU UUCP: ...!cbosgd!wright!jsloan Computer Science Department, Wright State University, Dayton OH, 45435 +1 513 873 2491 belong(opinions,jsloan). belong(opinions,_):-!,fail. The only thing that depreciates faster than a computer is fresh fruit.
patwood@unirot.UUCP (Patrick Wood) (03/06/87)
There are two typesetters that understand PostScript. Both are produced by Allied Linotype. They are the Linotronic 100 and 300. The L100 has a maximum resolution of 1270 DPI, and the L300 has a maximum resolution of 2540 DPI. Both can be bought with or without the PostScript interface (called a RIP or Raster Image Processor). The L100 costs approximately $30K with the RIP, and the L300 approximately $60K (1986 costs). Both typesetters have the same communications ports as a LaserWriter: Appletalk and Serial. The maximum serial speed supported is 57.6K baud. Both XON/XOFF and DTR toggling are supported as flow control. The typesetters come with the standard LaserWriter fonts (the Plus fonts may be purchased separately). We have used a service with a L100 quite extensively, with few problems. The only incompatibilities come about due to the way the pages are oriented on the L100: the film comes from a roll that is 12" wide. The pages are printed "sideways" or with the y axis along the 12" part of the page. The image area of the page is exactly 8 1/2 x 11 inches, and there is an operator specific to the Linotronic RIP that changes the image area and page orientation. If you have the money and need to do PostScript typesetting, these machines are IT. The quality of the output at 1270 DPI rivals many machines at higher resolutions due to the imaging mechanism: a laser scanning the page raster by raster. At 2540 DPI, the L300 is one of the best typesetters going. It can also run at 1270 DPI, and will run faster than an L100 on text-intensive jobs. Pat Wood Editor, The PostScript Language Journal