yip@mcgill-vision.uucp (McGill/CONCAVE Group) (08/13/90)
I work in a department where there are a dozen Macintosh IIs connected via TOPS. There are many "artistic" jobs here that take approx. forever (30 mins.+) to print, such as PageMaker documents with several logos and text in several fonts, etc. During all this time, the printer light blinks and blinks just so that a sheet of paper gets sucked in during the last 30 secs. There must surely be a better away to print a one-page layout. I would like to know what is the closest thing to instantaneous printing I can buy, hardware and/or software-wise. -Rick Vitale.
gaynor@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Jim Gaynor) (08/13/90)
In article <1990Aug12.192507.25547@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> yip@mcgill-vision.uucp (McGill/CONCAVE Group) writes: >[...] There are many "artistic" jobs here that >take approx. forever (30 mins.+) to print, such as PageMaker >documents with several logos and text in several fonts, etc. >During all this time, the printer light blinks and blinks just >so that a sheet of paper gets sucked in during the last 30 secs. >There must surely be a better away to print a one-page layout. >I would like to know what is the closest thing to instantaneous >printing I can buy, hardware and/or software-wise. The closest thing to "instantaneous printing" that you could buy would most likely not only be out of your price range, but out of the range of most small corporations. You see, the amount of time that a document takes to print on a laserprint is a function of the complexity of the document and the processing power of the printer. You sound like you're printing quite complex documents - a number of typefaces and styles, complicated graphics, and probably some scanned images. These things take time for the printer to image. What your computer sends to the printer is the raw postscript data. Mathematical functions defining curves, lines, shapes, gradient fills, and all the other wonderful things that make laserprinters the addicting beasties they are. The printer's processor (that's right, most postscript laserprinters, including Apple's, have their own processor. A computer in it's own right.) then has to take those functions and do the actual plotting. It has to determine the status of every single dot on the page, and it can't print until it has built the complete image. That's what it's doing while the light is flashing. Drawing your page in it's own memory. Of course, you say. But my screen draws the image in seconds. Why doesn't the printer? Well, your screen is at 72 dpi. That means that for an 8.5 x 11 page with one inch margins, your computer only has to keep track of 303,264 dots. And unless you have a full-page display, not even all of those are computed at once. At 300 dpi, your printer's resolution, it has to keep track of 5,265,000 dots - more than 17 times your screen. And your computer has the advantage of low-resolution bitmaps for your display fonts, and programs like PageMaker usually make low-res bitmaps for your graphics, too, for better response time when refreshing the screen. I'd bet, if you used Adobe Type Manager on -every- display face at -every- size, cut out all the low-res bitmaps, and used a full-page display on a 8Mhz 68000 Mac, your screen would take a minute or two to draw itself. Multiply that by 17. There you go. Besides, how many -minutes- would it take you to draw that by hand? When viewed in that light, 30 minutes isn't bad at all. Though I'd certainly -like- instantaneous printing... -=- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Jim Gaynor - The Ohio State Univ. - IRCC - Facilities Mgmt. - OCES <whew!> | | Email [gaynor@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu], [gaynor@agvax2.ag.ohio-state.edu] | |_ "Jim Gaynor explores The Land of VAXen! Will IRCC survive? Nahhh...." _|
alex@grian.cps.altadena.ca.us (Alex Pournelle) (08/14/90)
gaynor@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Jim Gaynor) writes: >In article <1990Aug12.192507.25547@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> yip@mcgill-vision.uucp (McGill/CONCAVE Group) writes: >>[...] take approx. forever (30 mins.+) to print, such as PageMaker > The closest thing to "instantaneous printing" that you could >buy would most likely not only be out of your price range, >[The] computer sends to the printer is the raw postscript data. >[explanation that TANSTAAFL, and PostScript doubly so] Hate to complain, but the protocol overhead on dear 'ol' PostScript and especially LocalTalk is a major factor, here. On a solo Se/30 connected to a 68020-based NEC SilentWriter, it still takes for-freaking EVER just to transfer the job to the printer. Some of that is the silliness of converting bitmaps to an ASCII-palatable format, shovelling that over L/T and then re-bitmapping (a wart promised to disappear with P/S version ][ or whatever it'll be called), but the protocol overhead of L/T and background printing is pretty heavy too. One man's opinion. But having used a IIfx with a IINTX all the way down to an Plus with a L/J I, I feel strongly about it! (Not to say it's much better on the PC side. I spent a 1/2 hour on the phone to MicroSoft today about Windows 3.0 print "speed" and lack thereof. Oi. The best cure is to spoof the driver by sending output to LPT1.PRN or LPT1.OS2. Riiiight. Now I'm s'posed to get all this stuff working on a Mac plus PC over Novell network? Geez, I hope they pay me.) Doggedly, Alex -- Alex Pournelle, freelance thinker Also: Workman & Associates, Data recovery for PCs, Macs, others ...elroy!grian!alex; BIX: alex; voice: (818) 791-7979 fax: (818) 794-2297 bbs: 791-1013; 8N1 24/12/3