[comp.text.tex] TeX at 1270 dpi

rokicki@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki) (05/30/90)

> 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.

I routinely print TeX jobs using full CM fonts at 1270 dpi on
Linotronic printers.

> 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. 

Sounds like the printer driver you are using isn't intelligent about
managing the memory of the Linotronic.  The `dvips' driver available on
Labrea (I recommend using 4.21 until we get all the bugs out of 5.0)
works well at high resolution for two reasons:

	- It compresses the fonts so they don't take as much memory
		in the printer; 1270 dpi fonts typically take only a
		little more memory than the same fonts uncompressed
		at 300 dpi.
	- It is smart about calculating the memory available in the
		printer and automatically breaking the document up
		into pieces as necessary to get it to print.  This
		depends on you having an accurate estimate of the amount
		of VM in your printer, but a simple vmstatus/show
		statement can get that.

> 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.

Oh, they ain't so bad.  Wait until you start dealing with raster images.
And then color raster images.

-tom