[comp.lang.postscript] Printing color sun screen dumps on a postscript printer

hidley@odin.ucsd.edu (Greg Hidley) (02/25/89)

We here at UC San Diego have been very unsuccessful at being able to 
provide support for printing (on postscript printers) screendumps from 
color sun displays. We use the commands:

	screendump | rastfilter8to1 | rast2ps | lpr
    OR
	screendump | rastfilter8to1 | pssun | lpr

On all non-386i suns we experience various problems with the image.
It prints but has areas of the screen which are severly corrupted 
on the printout as if there is some form of a synching problem which
corrupts the generated raster file.

On the 386i both pssun and rast2ps tell us these are not raster image
files or cannot be read as such (but screendump > foo; screenload < foo
works fine!, indicating the dumping is fine, but not the conversion).
This may be an architecture specific problem as it does not occur on
non-386 based suns.

Have any of you found a way to succesfully dump and print color images
on a (non-color) Postscript printer. We have had no luck with our
stable of sun 2's, 3's, or 4's (and variety of different color 
interfaces). Any advice will be appreciated.

thanks
greg



	Greg Hidley	Division of Engineering, R-003
			University of California, San Diego
			La Jolla, CA. 92093 (619) 534-5775

Bitnet: 	hidley@ucsd
Internet:	hidley@ucsd.edu
UUCP:		ucsd!hidley

pvo1478@neptune.uucp (Paul O'Neill) (02/26/89)

In article <5987@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> hidley@odin.ucsd.edu (Greg Hidley) writes:
>
>We here at UC San Diego have been very unsuccessful at being able to 
>provide support for printing (on postscript printers) screendumps from 
>color sun displays. We use the commands:
>
>	screendump | rastfilter8to1 | rast2ps | lpr
>    OR
>	screendump | rastfilter8to1 | pssun | lpr
>

Aaargh.  Don't dither the image with rastfilter8to1 and only send 1-bit data
to the postscript printer.  Send the printer 8-bit data and let it do the
dithering.

Use psraster (anonymous ftp from titan.rice.edu: /sun-source).
However psraster has a bug in that it does not reclaim it's VM and will
run out for large images.  Apply this diff:

yourhost% diff psraster.c.orig psraster.c
194c194
<        fprintf( outfile, "{GetImageRow} image\n");
---
>        fprintf( outfile, "{restore save GetImageRow}  save 6 1 roll image\n");

screendump | psraster | lpr

Even sexier is: dumpregion | psraster | lpr

dumpregion is also available from titan.rice.edu.

Good luck,


Paul O'Neill                 pvo@oce.orst.edu
Coastal Imaging Lab
OSU--Oceanography
Corvallis, OR  97331         503-754-3251

barnett@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) (03/02/89)

In article <5987@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> hidley@odin.ucsd.edu (Greg Hidley) writes:
>
>We here at UC San Diego have been very unsuccessful at being able to
>provide support for printing (on postscript printers) screendumps from
>color sun displays. We use the commands:

Some tips on this.

On suns with the overlay plane (3/60, 3/110, 4/xxx)
a sunview screen may have some of the display on the B&W plane, and other
parts on the color planes. The default is to use the B&W plane for most
windows, and the color planes for the canvas windows.

When you do a screendump, you can specify either plane.
You may, therefore, only get half of what you want.
You can start up SunView using just the b&w plane, or just the color plane.
see sunview(1).

There is also a known bug that if anything moves on the screen (like the
minute hand on a clock) during the screendump, the image may be corrupted.

--
	Bruce G. Barnett 	barnett@ge-crd.ARPA, barnett@steinmetz.ge.com
				uunet!steinmetz!barnett