bob+@andrew.cmu.edu (Bob Sidebotham) (09/16/88)
For people with relatively modest volume printing requirements, it would seem ideal to be able to buy a cheap printing engine, without PostScript support, and do the PostScript to raster conversion in the host computer. Does anyone know if there is any such product on the market, or anticipated to be? If someone could build an effective implementation of this software, I'm sure it would have a ready market. Given the existence of Display PostScript and other PostScript interpretors, it seems that it might almost be possible to build something like this with off-the-shelf components. I'd even be willing to buy such a package from Adobe, if they charged a reasonable price and didn't try to bundle too many high-priced fonts with it. I'm assuming that dumb printers are available that can actually be hooked up to your machine: I'm told that (1) Canon laser printing engines can be had for as little as $900 and (2) the Mac's SCSI bus is fast enough to drive the laser printer directly. I don't know whether a dumb-enough interface is available for the printer, however (that is, an interface without any added-value (diablo mode, etc.) to drive it's price up). Is there something technically wrong with this suggestion? Bob Sidebotham Carnegie Mellon University P.S. I sent out a variant of this post some time ago, but haven't seen it. I assume it was lost.
hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (09/16/88)
> buy a cheap printing engine, without PostScript support, >and do the PostScript to raster conversion in the host computer. Does anyone >know if there is any such product on the market, or anticipated to be? IBM has a Postscript implementation for their PC's that appears to do conversion on the PC. They seem to use a barebones print engine, a board that fits in the PC and generates the image, and software on the PC that does the Postscript. An interesting approach to bringing down the cost of Postscript printing. Also, for the IBM mainframes, there are several printers that appear to use an IBM (or possibly ANSI) command set, with Postscript software for the mainframe. I don't have any more information, as I've only seen glossy descriptions in passing, so don't ask me for any more details.
malloy@nprdc.arpa (Sean Malloy) (09/16/88)
In article <AXA4Jay00VsMI1MUcA@andrew.cmu.edu> bob+@andrew.cmu.edu (Bob Sidebotham) writes: >For people with relatively modest volume printing requirements, it would seem >ideal to be able to buy a cheap printing engine, without PostScript support, >and do the PostScript to raster conversion in the host computer. Does anyone >know if there is any such product on the market, or anticipated to be? . . . There is a company here in San Diego (unfortunately, I've misplaced the flyer I picked up at the San Diego Computer Fair over Labor Day Weekend -- I'll find it this weekend and post the information) that makes a product called 'GoScript' for IBM PCs and clones. This is an entirely software-based Postscript-compatible interpreter that will output to many dot-matrix and laser printers, and a number of plotters. The program uses Bitstream's soft font packages, so adding fonts to the output should be simple. An update to the GoScript package to implement the Postscript color model is under development -- they were demoing an alpha version of the color output on an HP plotter at the Computer Fair, as well as running the current B&W version. The output looked pretty good on the dot matrix printer (unfortunately, they don't yet support the 360x360 dpi mode on my NEC printer, but the 240x240 Epson compatibility is supported). On the HP LaserJet, I couldn't tell the difference between its output and output from a Laserwriter. The only problem with the program, and one that may or may not be a major problem, depending on your needs, is that it's _slow_. Doing a complex PostScript image can take upwards of 45 minutes. The GoScript package is being sold for $195. I will dig out the flyer I picked up and post the address for the company. Sean Malloy Navy Personnel Research & Development Center San Diego, CA 92152-6800 malloy@nprdc.arpa
yoram@link.columbia.edu (Yoram Eisenstadter) (09/16/88)
In article <Sep.15.20.22.32.1988.622@athos.rutgers.edu> hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes: >> buy a cheap printing engine, without PostScript support, >>and do the PostScript to raster conversion in the host computer... > >IBM has a Postscript implementation for their PC's that appears to do >conversion on the PC. They seem to use a barebones print engine, a >board that fits in the PC and generates the image, and software on the >PC that does the Postscript. An interesting approach to bringing down >the cost of Postscript printing. The innocuous-looking little board that goes along with the IBM Personal Pageprinter contains a 68000 processor and 2MB of memory. The Postscript interpreter runs on this processor, not on the PC (which I believe is used only for I/O). I don't see a big cost differential between putting the 68000 on an external board the way IBM does, and putting it inside the printer box the way Apple, for example, does. Cheers..Y Yoram Eisenstadter | ARPAnet yoram@cs.columbia.edu Columbia University | UUCP rutgers!columbia!garfield!yoram 450 Computer Science Bldg. | uunet!cs.columbia.edu!yoram
ted@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Edward J. Ede) (09/16/88)
In article <AXA4Jay00VsMI1MUcA@andrew.cmu.edu> bob+@andrew.cmu.edu (Bob Sidebotham) writes: >For people with relatively modest volume printing requirements, it would seem >ideal to be able to buy a cheap printing engine, without PostScript support, >and do the PostScript to raster conversion in the host computer. Does anyone >know if there is any such product on the market, or anticipated to be? If IBM does their PostScript translation on a card in a PC, then blasts the bits to an attached engine. I'm not sure why they chose to do it this way, maybe to transfer bits from the card to the screen. I can't imagine that this approach is cheaper than a "normal" PS printer. I think you're asking about native PS interpretation though. >someone could build an effective implementation of this software, I'm sure it >would have a ready market. Given the existence of Display PostScript and other >PostScript interpretors, it seems that it might almost be possible to build >something like this with off-the-shelf components. I'd even be willing to buy >such a package from Adobe,if they charged a reasonable price and didn't try to >bundle too many high-priced fonts with it. > >I'm assuming that dumb printers are available that can actually be hooked upto >your machine: I'm told that (1) Canon laser printing engines can be had for as >little as $900 and (2) the Mac's SCSI bus is fast enough to drive the laser >printer directly. I don't know whether a dumb-enough interface is available >for the printer, however (that is, an interface without any added-value(diablo >mode, etc.) to drive it's price up). > >Is there something technically wrong with this suggestion? First of all, your machine would need a lot of memory to image the entire page. Display PS is feasible because the resolution of most screens is lower than the standard 300x300 dpi. A 300x300 dpi printer would require 9 times the memory of a 100x100 screen. (300x300x8.5x11) = ~ 1 Megabyte. You could do the page in passes, but that would require multiple interpretations of the PostScript. Secondly, PostScript is an extremely powerful language, and non-trivial to interpret. Your Mac/PC would be tied up for quite a while while imaging the pages, reducing your productivity. Look through the Red Book and examine what all of the operators can do. They don't stick 68020's in these printers for no good reason. With PostScript in software, it would be easier for a hacker to reverse engineer crucial parts of the software. (e.g. the "eexec" operator, font rendering algorythms.) I'm sure Adobe wants to protect this for as long as they can. (I realize that one could pull the chips from a PS printer, but that's beyond the means of many people.) You can buy a NEC PostScript printer for about $3,300. I don't think that's unreasonably expensive for what you get. >Bob Sidebotham >Carnegie Mellon University Ted Ede -- ted@mitre-bedford.arpa -- The MITRE Corporation -- Burlington Road | linus!mbunix!ted -- Bedford MA, 01730 -- Mail Stop B015 -- (617) 271-2524 | | - this line intentionally left blank - | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) (09/17/88)
From article <39964@linus.UUCP>, by ted@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Edward J. Ede): "... " (300x300x8.5x11) = ~ 1 Megabyte. You could do the page in passes, but " that would require multiple interpretations of the PostScript. Maybe you could do it in passes, but maybe you couldn't recalculate the page fast enough to supply the print engine with data. Does anyone know how the "band device" referred to in the PS Reference Manual works? Perhaps there's a way to avoid more than one full interpretation per page and still get by with less than a full page buffer. Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu
fmr@cwi.nl (Frank Rahmani) (09/19/88)
> >> buy a cheap printing engine, without PostScript support, >>and do the PostScript to raster conversion in the host computer. Does anyone >>know if there is any such product on the market, or anticipated to be? > If I recall it all right this is what Whitechapel in England once did. They sold a naked printing engine as well as a naked scanner and used the memory of their NS16032 box running Genix (a 4.2 BSD clone). This was sold as a complete desktop textprocessing system. I didn't get the impression that they sold it a lot. -- It is better never to have been born. But who among us has such luck? Maintainer's Motto: If we can't fix it, it ain't broke. These opinions are solely mine and in no way reflect those of my employer.
phil@osiris.UUCP (Philip Kos) (09/20/88)
Random thoughts, bald-faced assumptions, generalizations, and probably some
damned lies ahead. Correct if you feel obligated, contradict me if you feel
like it (I love a good bloody argument).
I thought for awhile about the differences between doing the PostScript
interpretation in the printer (as in an Apple LaserWriter) and doing it in
your PC or whatever, and here are some observations I came up with. I'm
curious as to whether anyone at all will agree with me. ;-)
+ An "onboard" (i.e. running inside the main system) PostScript "engine"
will communicate with the host system via its bus, and with the print
"engine" via a system I/O port.
+ A system's bus will tend to have much more bandwidth than any one of its
I/O ports.
+ Input to the PS "engine" is a relatively small amount of PS data to be
interpreted and converted to printing engine data.
+ Output from the PS "engine" is a relatively large amount of data (in
general, compared to its input).
+ Putting the PS engine inside the host computer pretty much forces it (for
reasons of simplicity if nothing else) to get its input (small) from the
system bus (high-speed) and send its output (large) out a system I/O port
(low-speed). Can you say "bottle-neck"?
+ Putting the PS engine inside the printer pretty much forces it to get its
input (small) from the printer's I/O port (low-speed) and send its output
(large) over the printer's internal bus (high speed).
+ The minimum latency of any multi-stage pipeline cannot be less than the
maximum single-stage latency.
+ Deliberately designing a system so that it contains bottlenecks or other
artificial flow restrictions is not a really great idea, although in the
case of commercial products it provides a very convenient upgrade path so
is done occasionally (I'm not joking, many otherwise-well-respected
companies have been known to do such things).
My personal conclusion is that it makes a lot more sense to put the PS
engine in the printer. As a respondent noted, having it in the PC gives
you the opportunity to send the "dots" (assuming the PS engine is driving a
raster device, which is probably one of the safest assumptions I've seen
this month) to the screen instead of the printer. This may be true but I'd
hate to have to wait while a scan conversion program went from the 200+ dpi
of the typical raster printer to the <100dpi of the typical monitor. The
output from a PS engine tends to be HIGHLY device-dependent, and for reasons
of performance will probably remain so for at least another generation of
silicon.
Phil Kos
Information Systems
...!uunet!pyrdc!osiris!phil The Johns Hopkins Hospital
Baltimore, MDmalloy@nprdc.arpa (Sean Malloy) (09/20/88)
In article <887@skinner.nprdc.arpa> malloy@nprdc.arpa (Sean Malloy) writes: |In article <AXA4Jay00VsMI1MUcA@andrew.cmu.edu> bob+@andrew.cmu.edu (Bob Sidebotham) writes: |>For people with relatively modest volume printing requirements, it would seem |>ideal to be able to buy a cheap printing engine, without PostScript support, |>and do the PostScript to raster conversion in the host computer. Does anyone |>know if there is any such product on the market, or anticipated to be? . . . | |There is a company here in San Diego (unfortunately, I've misplaced |the flyer I picked up at the San Diego Computer Fair over Labor Day |Weekend -- I'll find it this weekend and post the information) that |makes a product called 'GoScript' for IBM PCs and clones. This is an |entirely software-based Postscript-compatible interpreter that will |output to many dot-matrix and laser printers, and a number of |plotters. The program uses Bitstream's soft font packages, so adding |fonts to the output should be simple. Okay, here's the information from the flyer I picked up: The company is called LaserGo; their address is 9235 Trade Place, Suite A, San Diego, CA 92126. Their phone number is (619)530-2400. They maintain an RBBS bulletin board, 300/1200 baud; the number is (619)530-0013. o 13 outline fonts licensed from Bitstream o Courier, Dutch, Swiss, Symbol typefaces compatible with Apple Laserwriter fonts (the Courier, Helvetica, Times, and Symbol font equivalents -- SRM) o Fonts that can be scaled to any size and rotated to any angle o Text and graphic element manipulation: rotation + scaling + special effects o Continue to use printer for applications not requiring a page decription language o Use in both command and interactive mode o Takes advantage of expanded memory and numeric processor if available o Printers supported: HP LaserJet family & compatibles HP Deskjet Canon LBP-8II Canon Bubble Jet BJ-130 LaserGo GoCard controller Epson FX & LQ series dot matrix & compatibles IBM ProPrinter . . . and others (unfortunately, the person manning the booth didn't know what others -- SRM) o Compatible with: Xerox Ventura Publisher, Microsoft Word, Aldus PageMaker, Borland Quattro, and others System Requirements: o IBM PC/XT/AT or compatible, or IBM PS/2, running PC/MS-DOS 3.0 or later o 640Kb of memory and a hard disk o Optional: 1Mb or 2Mb expanded memory in PC; numeric coprocessor GoScript builds the page image on your hard disk, or can be installed to use LIM expanded memory, then outputs the final graphics image in your printer's graphics mode. GoScript will take advantage of a numeric coprocessor if one is installed to speed computation of the page image. GoScript is listed for $195.00; a companion product, the GoCard, is a card that speeds transfer of bitmap images to Canon engine-based laser printers, and will work for other applications as well as GoScript. The GoCard lists for $349.00. An additional software package, LaserGL, lists for $95.00 and enables GoScript to output to HPGL-compatible plotters. Orders within California add 6.5% tax; shipping is $5.00 per order. COD, VISA, MasterCard, and checks are accepted. Sean Malloy Navy Personnel Research & Development Center San Diego, CA 92152-6800 malloy@nprdc.arpa
rich@island.uu.net (Rich Fanning ) (09/23/88)
In article <1687@osiris.UUCP> phil@osiris.UUCP (Philip Kos) writes: >+ An "onboard" (i.e. running inside the main system) PostScript "engine" > will communicate with the host system via its bus, and with the print > "engine" via a system I/O port. > >+ A system's bus will tend to have much more bandwidth than any one of its > I/O ports. ^^^^^^^^ In at least one example I know of, the connection from the PS engine, or RIP, to the printer is actually coaxial cable with a high-bandwidth "video" signal. This signal does not connect back to the PC bus in any way. Note that this "video signal" is not NSTC, RGB, or anything of the sort, but reduces the time required to transmit the full page bitmap to something on the order of a second or two. -- Rich Fanning {uunet,sun,well}!island!rich (415) 491-1000 Island Graphics Corp. 4000 Civic Center Drive San Rafael, CA 94903
richk@pogo.GPID.TEK.COM (Richard G. Knowles) (09/23/88)
In article <1687@osiris.UUCP> phil@osiris.UUCP (Philip Kos) writes: > ... >I thought for awhile about the differences between doing the PostScript >interpretation in the printer (as in an Apple LaserWriter) and doing it in >your PC or whatever, and here are some observations I came up with. I'm >curious as to whether anyone at all will agree with me. ;-) > ... >+ Putting the PS engine inside the host computer pretty much forces it (for > reasons of simplicity if nothing else) to get its input (small) from the > system bus (high-speed) and send its output (large) out a system I/O port > (low-speed). Can you say "bottle-neck"? Please note that the print engine itself is almost always the "bottle-neck" and that the "low-speed" system I/O port will always have enough bandwidth to stay up with or ahead of the print engine (else it would cause printing artifacts due to the starting and stopping of the print engine). Of the various PostScript(R) printers we have around here, most cannot even keep up with the "small" input stream coming in at 9600 baud. My observations are that the physical/logical separation of the interpreter and the engine make little difference in the efficiency of the overall printing operation, but make have an impact on maintainability and reliability (with pluses and minuses both ways). ------------------------------------------------------------------ Whatever I say is my fault and no one elses! Richard G. Knowles tektronix!pogo!richk Graphics Printing and Imaging or Tektronix, Inc; D/S 63-356 richk@pogo.GPID.TEK.COM Wilsonville, Or 97070 (503) 685-3860
snoopy@sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy T. Beagle) (09/24/88)
||>For people with relatively modest volume printing requirements, it would seem ||>ideal to be able to buy a cheap printing engine, without PostScript support, ||>and do the PostScript to raster conversion in the host computer. Does anyone ||>know if there is any such product on the market, or anticipated to be? . . . ||makes a product called 'GoScript' for IBM PCs and clones. This is an ||entirely software-based Postscript-compatible interpreter that will ||output to many dot-matrix and laser printers, and a number of ||plotters. The program uses Bitstream's soft font packages, so adding ||fonts to the output should be simple. |System Requirements: |o IBM PC/XT/AT or compatible, or IBM PS/2, |GoScript is listed for $195.00; Sounds good, is there something available in source for those of us who use unix machines rather than ms-dosn't machines? (I just started reading this group, apologies if the answer has already been posted and I missed it. If so, could someone email me the article(s)?) _____ /_____\ Snoopy /_______\ |___| tektronix!tekecs!sopwith!snoopy |___| sun!nosun!illian!sopwith!snoopy
bob+@andrew.cmu.edu (Bob Sidebotham) (09/28/88)
> *Excerpts from ext.nn.comp.lang.postscript: 16-Sep-88 Re: Host software* > *alternati.. Edward J. Ede@mitre-bedf (3222)* > A 300x300 dpi printer > would require 9 times the memory of a 100x100 screen. > (300x300x8.5x11) = ~ 1 Megabyte. You could do the page in passes, but > that > would require multiple interpretations of the PostScript. The point is that rather than buying a MB of memory and an additional 68000 processor of some sort in a printer, where it's not much use most of the time, I'd rather allocate any additional memory to my Mac/SE, perhaps turning it into a 2MB machine. At that point, I could run MultiFinder and do the printing in the background anyway. Bob Sidebotham (bob+@andrew.cmu.edu) Carnegie Mellon University