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From: ken@csis.dit.csiro.au (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: DVI to HP PaintJet Colour Printer?
Message-ID: <1990Dec17.021240.1698@csis.dit.csiro.au>
Date: 17 Dec 90 02:12:40 GMT
References: <1990Dec4.101958.807@computing-maths.cardiff.ac.uk> <3384@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: CSIRO Division of Information Technology
Lines: 19

>>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.