spworley@athena.mit.edu (Spaceman Spiff) (03/06/91)
I use and enjoy ProDraw 2.0- its slick, especially on an accelerated Amiga. My problem is outputting Postscript to PS printers- sometimes the output is too complex for the printer and it barfs. The Pro Draw manual warns about this- its the printer's fault. Does anyone know a way of easily splitting a region so it works? The thing that kills the PS output is a region (filled or not) with over about 800 segments in it. This is quite common when you use auto-trace. My application is really cool- I'm digitizing comics from the newspaper and blowing them up really big- it looks GREAT! [These are for my wall, not distribution, so no copyright flames!] Thanks! -Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Steve Worley spworley@athena.mit.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
espie@flamingo.Stanford.EDU (Marc Espie) (03/07/91)
In article <1991Mar6.111237.27374@athena.mit.edu> spworley@athena.mit.edu (Spaceman Spiff) writes: > >I use and enjoy ProDraw 2.0- its slick, especially on an accelerated >Amiga. > >My problem is outputting Postscript to PS printers- sometimes the >output is too complex for the printer and it barfs. The Pro Draw >manual warns about this- its the printer's fault. I'd guess the printer barfs by saying something like: %[VMError .... The manual's warning is a lame excuse. Every postscript printer has enough memory to perform *very* difficult jobs but there are rules to follow when generating postscript documents. Specifically: the postscript interpreter has a garbage collector, but you have to invoke it yourself (oversimplified) If there are unrelated drawings on the same page, it is a good idea to reclaim memory between each drawing, especially if each drawing uses memory. If you don't respect this basic rule, your printer will barf when a page is too complex. Given the type of thing that Pro Draw is supposed to do, this is probably what happens. I've seen enough brain-damaged postscript software to know the problem (sigh...). You can say this is the printer's fault, in as much as the program uses too much memory. You can also say this is the program's fault, for using too much memory in the first place. :-) I don't own ProDraw, and the postscript header is almost certainly copyrighted, so I can't check this. Would someone else be inclined to do that. -- Marc Espie (espie@flamingo.stanford.edu)