davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu ("John E. Davis") (01/24/91)
Hi,
Are there any well known problems with a Talaris laserprinter's emulation
of postscript? I am sorry but I do not have the particular model but I assume
it is the top of the line. We have it connected to our VAX/VMS 8650 as our
default system laser printer. Some of our postscript programs which run fine
on an apple laserwriter crash the talaris from time to time.
Thanks,
--
John
bitnet: davis@ohstpy
internet: davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edurli@bode.usc.edu (Li) (01/25/91)
Not only that, it is extremly slow too. At least 10 times slower than a Aplle LW. Remember that Talaris is sort of production type printer and is suppose to print very fast. I would say that it effectively does not work. li
herb@blender.uucp (Herb Peyerl) (01/30/91)
We tried out a Talaris XT2492 for about a month.. The Xerox people were particularly annoying but we ended up having to get the source for the Talaris ethernet driver from Talaris and porting the thing to the Apollo. The port was fairly easy and it only took a few days to get the thing working. However, as others have mentioned, TeX output was incredibly slow and once it did produce output it wasn't consistent with our QMS 810+ (ie: Font substitutions). I spoke with the people at Talaris about the speed of the XT2492 and TeX output to which they mentioned that they've written a dvi2excl driver which speeds it up incredibly. I never bothered trying it out since it seemed sort of stupid to me to have to run an EXCL driver to bypass the postscript for one application. Other applications we've tried are PCB Layouts... One of them was a 5.6MB postscript file which the printer refused to print. Our QMS810+ didn't have too much of a problem with it... In terms of speed, we thought the Talaris fell into the "Ridiculously slow" category... We ended up returning the Talaris and investing in a DEC PS20 which presently boots off our Vax and gets stuff from it via Decnet. Then we have a DecStation 3100 that acts as an lpd gateway to it as well so we can print to it from our TCP/IP hosts. In the meantime, I've written a prf->lpd driver for the Apollo so the whole thing looks transparent. The same 5.6MB file that wouldn't print on the Talaris prints on the PS20 in about 45 minutes which is about as long as it takes for our QMS 810+... We had a slight problem with TeX in that dvi2ps puts "Palatino" fonts in the header which the PS20 doesn't like... We've changed those to "Times" and it's fine... -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- UUCP: herb@blender.UUCP || #define Janitor Administrator ICBM: 51 03 N / 114 03 W || Apollo System_Janitor, Novatel Communications "I spilled spot remover on my dog and now he's gone..." <Steven Wright>
ralph@uhheph.phys.hawaii.edu (Ralph Becker-Szendy) (02/04/91)
In article <DAVIS.91Jan23131911@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu> davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu (John E. Davis) writes: > Are there any well known problems with a Talaris laserprinter's emulation >of postscript? I am sorry but I do not have the particular model but I assume >it is the top of the line. We have it connected to our VAX/VMS 8650 as our >default system laser printer. Some of our postscript programs which run fine >on an apple laserwriter crash the talaris from time to time. And <rli@bode.usc.edu (Li)> replies: >Not only that, it is extremly slow too. At least 10 times >slower than a Aplle LW. Remember that Talaris is sort of >production type printer and is suppose to print very fast. > I would say that it effectively does not work. Agree. We have a Talaris 1590 with the Talaris PSI cartridge (their PostScript interpreter). It is ridiculously slow. TeX output is a few minutes per page. Even simple graphics (just lines, only a handful macros defined) takes half an hour per page (with say several hundred line segments a page). Also the postscript interpreter is very unreliable. When I set up DVIPS to use more than 200000 bytes os memory (the printer says it has a megabyte) the page will not print, it gets a "Requirements for this page exceeded memory capacity". Graphics with several thousand line segments per page does the same. When downloading the standard Adobe ERROR.PS (to print errors instead of showing them on the front panel), many errors will not print, instead they reboot the printer. If the host is still sending data while that happens, the printer will come up in its default mode (which is EXCL, not postscript in our case) and start dumping page-after-page of postscript source. Lastly the print quality is very poor, every large black area gets washed out (large as in 12pt boldface font). After repeated complaints Talaris claims that this is a non-fixable peculiarity of the 15ppm Ricoh engine they use. At this point I have completely given up on the Talaris 1590 as a postscript printer, and use either a Apple LW or the DEC LPS40 (in the computer center). -- Ralph Becker-Szendy UHHEPG=24742::RALPH (HEPNet,SPAN) University of Hawaii RALPH@UHHEPG.PHYS.HAWAII.EDU High Energy Physics Group RALPH@UHHEPG.BITNET Watanabe Hall #203, 2505 Correa Road, Honolulu, HI 96822 (808)956-2931