JMS@MIS.ARIZONA.EDU (Why are they making this so HARD???) (05/18/88)
A recent question on the DEC Scriptprinter SW brings this message out. The first question is of licensing. Suppose you buy a scriptprinter. Does this mean you can now get the media? And where can you use it? And why? With what? Anyway, the whole thing is very confusing. But, if Digital refuses to sell the license (which they do), then they're just asking for confusion. Digital never did say they understood how to license software. So, we got the software by just asking for the media. There's an LN03 somewhere on campus, so they put the "license" on that one. The software won't work without changes on an Apple Laserwriter. The basic problem is that the Postscript implementation on the LN03R includes a "papersize" operator (or something like that) which isn't on the Laserwriter. So, all you do is take out papersize from the libraries in the TLB file and put in something like T T. It's not hard. But if you do fix the TLB files (if you care, let me know, and I'll dig them out), it works --- BEAUTIFULLY. Not on LATs, mind you, and not as quickly as some other possibilities, but it really works. For example, if you have an embedded VT100 escape sequence in your file like "turn on bold", it comes out BOLD on the printout. Really. Underlines even work. I don't remember if they dealt with overstrike, but I bet they did. The software won't work, however, on the Dataproducts 2665 because its imageable area is about a quarter inch or so smaller than an Apple LW, so you get the left two or three pixels off of each character shaved off. Sigh. That, there's no easy fix to. jms +----------------------------+ BITNET: jms@arizmis.BITNET |Joel M Snyder | Inter: jms@mis.arizona.edu |Univ of Arizona Dep't of MIS| Phone: 602.621.2748 ICBM: 32 13 N / 110 58 W |Tucson, AZ 85721 | Quote: "Design is everything. +----------------------------+ Implementation is trivial."