allred@ut-emx.UUCP (Kevin L. Allred) (07/19/90)
I recently bought a DeskJet Plus printer and got a copy of RUMDJET from some listserver over BITNET from Germany. (I couldn't get the recently posted DVIDJP to run under DOS -- I think it want's to allocate 1MB of memory for the bitmap. RUMDJET appears to makes multiple passes through the file; so it doesn't need such a big bitmap.) I added the posted DeskJet entry to local.mf and built the fonts needed to print sample.tex, using the emtex package. The output looks good -- almost indistingishable from laserprinted output. Is RUMDJET the best (MSDOS based) DVI to DeskJet driver? On to the big questions. At the university we have PS printers everywhere, so it is becoming fairly easy and standard to include graphics (rendered as PS) in TeX output. This won't work at home without buying UltraScript or such ( FSF ghostscript still is not available). The next logical approach would be to somehow render my graph, picture, etc. as a 300 DPI bitmap of suitible dimension, and then convince RUMDJET to put it in the output at the appropriate spot. The question is then, what tools are available to do this? 1) It seems that there should be a way to convert a bitmap of arbitrary dimension into a .pxl (or .gf or .pk) file with a suitable .tfm file. That way the bitmap could be treated as a large font with just one character, and thus it could be printed anywhere in the document. Does a utility exist to do this? 2) A lot of the graphs I include in my documents are tektronics output that has been converted to PS using tek2ps. Is there a utility to convert a tektronics file into an arbitray sized bitmap? I know for instance that the guts of one exist in an easily obtained form. MSKERMIT can render tektronics output at CGA, EGA, MGA, etc. resolutions. It seems reasonalbly that this part of the code could form the basis of a utility that would render the output to a bitmap of arbitray size. The only other thing that would be needed are fonts -- which thanks to metafont isn't a big problem. 3) What about GIF/TIFF/PXL/BMP file converters as well? -- Kevin Allred allred@emx.cc.utexas.edu allred@ut-emx.UUCP