[comp.text.tex] DVI to HP PaintJet Colour Printer?

justin@computing-maths.cardiff.ac.uk (Justin R Shuttleworth) (12/04/90)

I'm terribly sorry to bother anybody with this request.  I've read this
group for a couple of months now, and successfully brought up the TeX 3.0
release on my Sun.  I have both a postscript printer and one of these 
new-fangled HP PaintJet Colour printers and was wondering (as I
cannot find one) whether you folks knew where I could find a DVI 
converter for it.  It's an amazingly simple to drive raster device
so I can't imagine that the driver would be difficult to write, its
just that I'm supposed to be doing real work here ...

It also occurs to me that a super driver could read say up to 8 .dvi
files at once, and use the colour facilities of this printer.  The
printer can print on to special (read expensive) transparencies so
this means I could do my overheads in SliTeX and print them in 
one go! Hurrah!

Here's hoping,

Justin Shuttleworth

justin@cm.cf.ac.uk
shuttleworth@cf.ac.uk
jrs@v1.astro.cf.ac.uk
 

jcb@cs.ed.ac.uk (Julian Bradfield) (12/11/90)

In article <1990Dec4.101958.807@computing-maths.cardiff.ac.uk>
justin@computing-maths.cardiff.ac.uk (Justin R Shuttleworth) writes:

>release on my Sun.  I have both a postscript printer and one of these 
>new-fangled HP PaintJet Colour printers and was wondering (as I
>cannot find one) whether you folks knew where I could find a DVI 
>converter for it.  It's an amazingly simple to drive raster device

If there isn't one around, I intend to write one, but not until February.

>It also occurs to me that a super driver could read say up to 8 .dvi
>files at once, and use the colour facilities of this printer.  The
>printer can print on to special (read expensive) transparencies so
>this means I could do my overheads in SliTeX and print them in 
>one go! Hurrah!

Yuk. I propose to support colour by making the default colour
changeable, and allowing the assignment of specific colours to
specific fonts, all controllable by \special's.
Some fairly simple hacks to SliTeX should then be possible to make it
produce the required specials in one dvi file.

ken@csis.dit.csiro.au (Ken Yap) (12/17/90)

>>It also occurs to me that a super driver could read say up to 8 .dvi
>>files at once, and use the colour facilities of this printer.  The
>>printer can print on to special (read expensive) transparencies so
>>this means I could do my overheads in SliTeX and print them in 
>>one go! Hurrah!
>
>Yuk. I propose to support colour by making the default colour
>changeable, and allowing the assignment of specific colours to
>specific fonts, all controllable by \special's.
>Some fairly simple hacks to SliTeX should then be possible to make it
>produce the required specials in one dvi file.

See my article in a recent TUGBOAT where I describe a DVI backend for
SliTeX to generate colour raster files for a film recorder. In this
driver I merged colour layer files. I concluded it would have been
better to do it the other way, generate \specials (either from modified
macros or from merging DVI files) and have the backend switch colours.
Reason:  much less data to handle at the TeX or DVI stage, also more
portable.