tj@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Terry Jones) (05/26/90)
We have a Linotronic typesetter at University of Toronto and I would be interested in hearing about user experiences with TeX and high resolution output devices. In particular jobs fail regularly with a VM Error (out of memory) and I am interested in hearing of others with similar experience and of ANY possible solutions to this. 1270 dpi fonts, aside from eating disk space like chocolate chip cookies are cumbersome to move around networks, and consume memory on the linotronic. This causes most of the problems as far as I can determine. Some pages when processed with a dvi2ps that uses the builtin fonts on the lino for all but math STILL failed when there were a lot of different fonts on a page (8 different families or sizes). This appeared to be very inefficient re-encoding of the builtin fonts. Lets hear from anyone please... tj
jansteen@cwi.nl (Jan van der Steen) (05/28/90)
In comp.fonts you write: >We have a Linotronic typesetter at University of Toronto and I would >be interested in hearing about user experiences with TeX and high >resolution output devices. Well, I don't have experience with TeX in particular but I do have experience with the Linotronic in combination with downloaded fonts. In particular, we have a collection bitmap fonts in PostScript format at 720 dpi used to print house style publications. When processing those jobs on the Linotronic we also did run out of memory. >In particular jobs fail regularly with a VM Error (out of memory) and >I am interested in hearing of others with similar experience and of ANY >possible solutions to this. The solution I came up with was to write some kind of "garbage collector". The garbage collector will do a "vmstatus" each time a new font is created. If the memory drops down a certain value (I took as threshold 250000 bytes) all important environment values are written to disk and a "restore" of a previous "save" is performed. After the "restore" the environment (which is erased by a "restore" action) is fetched from disk and we can continue with a clean memory. People wo are interested in the code can mail me. >1270 dpi fonts, aside from eating disk space like chocolate chip cookies >are cumbersome to move around networks, and consume memory on the linotronic. >This causes most of the problems as far as I can determine. Some pages >when processed with a dvi2ps that uses the builtin fonts on the lino for >all but math STILL failed when there were a lot of different fonts on >a page (8 different families or sizes). This appeared to be very inefficient >re-encoding of the builtin fonts. >Lets hear from anyone please... I talked to the Linotronic salesman about this problem and he inquired the research lab about any memory extension possibilities. There weren't any! However, they recognized the problem and may do some modifications on the ROM's to support more memory in future releases. The limited memory of the Linotronic made us decide to buy a Compugraphic typesetter driven by an Agfa engine with Adobe ROM's. This implementation supports 4 Mb of virtual memory; enough for our purposes. Jan van der Steen -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Jan van der Steen jansteen@cwi.nl Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) Kruislaan 413, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
mario@madarch.man.ac.uk (Mario Wolczko) (06/06/90)
In article <1990May26.040231.22931@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>, tj@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Terry Jones) writes: > We have a Linotronic typesetter at University of Toronto and I would > be interested in hearing about user experiences with TeX and high > resolution output devices. > > In particular jobs fail regularly with a VM Error (out of memory) and > I am interested in hearing of others with similar experience and of ANY > possible solutions to this. We use a Linotronic with a modified version of LaTeX, which I call PS-LaTeX (it uses PostScript fonts where possible). It's 99.9% LaTeX compatible. The use of PostScript fonts circumvents most of the VM problems (we only have trouble with LaTeX picture mode, which means we have to do those pages separately). Otherwise, works fine. For the proof, look at these two books, published in the last 6 months: C.B.Jones, Systematic Software Development using VDM, 2nd ed, Prentice-Hall International, and C.B.Jones and R.C.F.Shaw, eds, Case Studies in Systematic Software Development, Prentice-Hall International pslatex can be got from the Clarkson server (sun.soe.clarkson.edu). Mario Wolczko ______ Dept. of Computer Science Internet: mario@cs.man.ac.uk /~ ~\ The University USENET: mcsun!ukc!man.cs!mario ( __ ) Manchester M13 9PL JANET: mario@uk.ac.man.cs `-': :`-' U.K. Tel: +44-61-275 6146 (FAX: 6280) ____; ;_____________the mushroom project___________________________________