[fa.info-vax] Imagen printers

info-vax (12/08/82)

>From reid%Shasta@SU-Score  Tue Dec  7 22:24:26 1982
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To: info-vax@Sandia, G.Ryland@SCORE
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Remailed-From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow  <Geoff5 at SRI-CSL>
Remailed-To: Info-VAX@SRI-CSL: ;

I stand by my statement that the 2 Imagen printers in the Stanford
Computer Systems lab are precariously close to being useless junk. It
is beginning to appear to me that perhaps other Imagen customers have
gotten better treatment; this means that I should switch from public
flaming about Imagen to private flaming at Imagen. Perhaps one of the
sites whose Imagen printers work properly could forward me a copy of
the controller prom contents and the Unix support software for it.
Given that most of the software was developed on Stanford's VAX, it is
very ironic that we didn't end up with working copies of it.

info-vax (12/08/82)

>From CPR@MIT-XX  Wed Dec  8 05:18:48 1982
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Remailed-From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow  <Geoff5 at SRI-CSL>
Remailed-To: Info-VAX@SRI-CSL: ;

Brian, since you are still flaming in public, I will respond in public:
you have contacted IMAGEN about one particular problem exactly once (that's
1 time), and never about the issues you mentioned in your earlier complaint.
Perhaps if you contact the IMAGEN customer support group you could get your
problems solved.  Other sites seem to find that to be the case.

I believe the irony of your situation is lost when you consider the
situation in this light: how can you get support if you don't ask for it?
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info-vax (12/10/82)

>From MCLINDEN@RUTGERS  Thu Dec  9 18:05:35 1982
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Remailed-From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow  <Geoff5 at SRI-CSL>
Remailed-To: Info-VAX@SRI-CSL: ;


  We have had an Imagen Imprint-10 for about 3 months and have the
  following comments:

    1. Print Quality: Having access to both a Xerox 9700 and the
    Imagen, I can honestly say that considering the difference in
    price, the difference in print quality is negligible. On the
    minus side for the Imagen, the Canon is advertised as a "plain
    paper copier"; in fact, this isn't quite true since high grade
    bond paper does not do well in the Canon environment. (This is
    something that Imagen readily told us when we purchased the
    printer.) On the plus side (and a minus for Xerox), we almost
    never have stray marks on pages printed with the Imagen, some-
    thing which is NOT true for the 9700. If you don't mind using
    shiny paper the Imagen is acceptable.

    2. Price: The original request was for inexpensive printers;
    at last glance the Xerox 9700 was $500K. Xerox does offer a
    more modestly price 2700, which they compare with the Imagen.
    The 2700 is disappointingly rigid; more promising is the
    printer which they sell with the Star set-up, but as someone
    else pointed out, you have to get the whole package which
    is over $40K. I have no knowledge of the Symbolics, although
    we considered them for a time. My "personal opinion" is they
    are aiming at the Lisp machine market for the time being, and
    we were going in a different direction.

    3 Fonts: Well, for all intents and purposes there is only
    one: Computer Modern (which is hardly my favorite). We weren't
    to thrilled about that so we wrote a program which converted
    the vfonts from Berkeley Unix to Impress fonts, and life has
    been much better since. We also have a little font editor which
    is crude but bearable. In general, I must say  that I was dis-
    appointed in the software people at Imagen (see below). Their
    strategy seems to be to go for breadth rather than depth, so
    that I don't believe that font support is high on their priority
    list. I understand that other people are working on converting
    TFM (TEX) fonts to Impress style raster fonts, but I haven't
    seen any of that.

    4. Software (in general). As long as people are going to hack
    away at C/A/T code from TROFF, trying to make it fit their
    printer, the quality and flexibility of the printer driver is
    going to be severely limited. Currently, troff output is filtered
    through 2 additional filters before the output is in Impress
    formast. The code for these operations has been developed at
    at least three different sites across the country and for three
    different purposes. The result is that no matter how much you
    hack it, troff never quite works the way you think it should
    and the problem is with the driver. We have been told, by the
    people at Imagen, that a totally new and original driver is in
    the works: GOOD! We are seriously considering device-independent
    troff if things get much worse. On the positive side, you can
    produce reasonably good looking papers with the current software,
    but much improvement is needed before we'll have the flexibility
    we expected when we bought the machine. Oh, and while we're on
    the subject, a word of warning. The current filter for troff
    output loads the fonts at compile time. The total number of
    font slots is 7 (or 8 depending on what you need). Since bold,
    italics, and symbols (like math), are separate "fonts" in the
    Impress terminology, almost all of the slots are filled by
    the characters for a single font style. The result is that if
    you want to use other fonts or font families, you must compile
    a separate filter for EACH font style you wish to use. This
    is only true if you want to use troff. The result is, of
    course, that it doesn't do you any good to have 40 font families
    unless you want to compile 40 filters. I am told that this 
    situation might be improved in the future, by loading fonts at
    execute time. Since the fonts are compiled anyway, this would
    not be hard to do, and by the time you see this, we may have
    done it ourselves, already.

    5. Hardware and General reliability. My experience has not been
    that of Brian Reid's. We have had no hardware problems with our
    machine and we are running at 19K from the DZ-11 with only minor
    problems (the big one being that the printer sends interrupts to
    the Vax when it wants something. This, of course, serves to remind
    everyone when the printer is up and running.) There are two possible
    solutions to this. One is to get the additional memory, which is
    ridiculously priced right now. The other may lie in an Ethernet
    link which we are contemplating (assiuming 4.2 is ever released).
    In general, I have found the service and software people very
    accommodating, my general impression is that this will be a good
    product in the near future. For now, I would have to say that I
    think that they marketed the product a bit too early, and that
    many of us are now finding the bugs. On the positive side we are
    ever more hopeful that this will turn out to be a good investment,
    something of which we were not sure in the first few weeks.

    Sean McLinden
    Decision Systems Lab
    University of Pittsburgh
    School of Medicine
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info-vax (02/28/83)

>From GEOFF@SRI-CSL  Sun Feb 27 18:07:49 1983
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Remailed-From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow  <Geoff5 at SRI-CSL>
Remailed-To: Info-VAX@SRI-CSL.ARPA: ;

With respect to the message that I sent around to this mailing list a
month ago about inexpensive laser printers, I think it is only fair to
say that two people from Imagen came to Stanford last week and spent
the afternoon overhauling our machine, and brought us actual
documentation. It hasn't failed or crashed since, and it's been more
than a week. It seems that my generalizations about Imagen printers
made from our experience were somewhat wrong. I think that what was
really going on is that we were Imagen's first customer, and that they
hadn't really gotten their act together when they delivered our
machines. (This kind of uneven service at the beginning is pretty
typical of startup companies, actually).

Brian Reid
Stanford