From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Newsgroups: fa.info-vax Title: Imagen Printers Article-I.D.: ucbvax.310 Posted: Thu Dec 9 18:12:23 1982 Received: Sat Dec 11 11:06:31 1982 >From MCLINDEN@RUTGERS Thu Dec 9 18:05:35 1982 Mail-From: ARPANET host SANDIA rcvd at 8-Dec-82 2139-PST Mail-From: ARPANET site RUTGERS rcvd at 8-Dec-82 2242-MST To: Info-Vax@SANDIA Remailed-Date: 9 Dec 1982 0039-PST Remailed-From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow Remailed-To: Info-VAX@SRI-CSL: ; We have had an Imagen Imprint-10 for about 3 months and have the following comments: 1. Print Quality: Having access to both a Xerox 9700 and the Imagen, I can honestly say that considering the difference in price, the difference in print quality is negligible. On the minus side for the Imagen, the Canon is advertised as a "plain paper copier"; in fact, this isn't quite true since high grade bond paper does not do well in the Canon environment. (This is something that Imagen readily told us when we purchased the printer.) On the plus side (and a minus for Xerox), we almost never have stray marks on pages printed with the Imagen, some- thing which is NOT true for the 9700. If you don't mind using shiny paper the Imagen is acceptable. 2. Price: The original request was for inexpensive printers; at last glance the Xerox 9700 was $500K. Xerox does offer a more modestly price 2700, which they compare with the Imagen. The 2700 is disappointingly rigid; more promising is the printer which they sell with the Star set-up, but as someone else pointed out, you have to get the whole package which is over $40K. I have no knowledge of the Symbolics, although we considered them for a time. My "personal opinion" is they are aiming at the Lisp machine market for the time being, and we were going in a different direction. 3 Fonts: Well, for all intents and purposes there is only one: Computer Modern (which is hardly my favorite). We weren't to thrilled about that so we wrote a program which converted the vfonts from Berkeley Unix to Impress fonts, and life has been much better since. We also have a little font editor which is crude but bearable. In general, I must say that I was dis- appointed in the software people at Imagen (see below). Their strategy seems to be to go for breadth rather than depth, so that I don't believe that font support is high on their priority list. I understand that other people are working on converting TFM (TEX) fonts to Impress style raster fonts, but I haven't seen any of that. 4. Software (in general). As long as people are going to hack away at C/A/T code from TROFF, trying to make it fit their printer, the quality and flexibility of the printer driver is going to be severely limited. Currently, troff output is filtered through 2 additional filters before the output is in Impress formast. The code for these operations has been developed at at least three different sites across the country and for three different purposes. The result is that no matter how much you hack it, troff never quite works the way you think it should and the problem is with the driver. We have been told, by the people at Imagen, that a totally new and original driver is in the works: GOOD! We are seriously considering device-independent troff if things get much worse. On the positive side, you can produce reasonably good looking papers with the current software, but much improvement is needed before we'll have the flexibility we expected when we bought the machine. Oh, and while we're on the subject, a word of warning. The current filter for troff output loads the fonts at compile time. The total number of font slots is 7 (or 8 depending on what you need). Since bold, italics, and symbols (like math), are separate "fonts" in the Impress terminology, almost all of the slots are filled by the characters for a single font style. The result is that if you want to use other fonts or font families, you must compile a separate filter for EACH font style you wish to use. This is only true if you want to use troff. The result is, of course, that it doesn't do you any good to have 40 font families unless you want to compile 40 filters. I am told that this situation might be improved in the future, by loading fonts at execute time. Since the fonts are compiled anyway, this would not be hard to do, and by the time you see this, we may have done it ourselves, already. 5. Hardware and General reliability. My experience has not been that of Brian Reid's. We have had no hardware problems with our machine and we are running at 19K from the DZ-11 with only minor problems (the big one being that the printer sends interrupts to the Vax when it wants something. This, of course, serves to remind everyone when the printer is up and running.) There are two possible solutions to this. One is to get the additional memory, which is ridiculously priced right now. The other may lie in an Ethernet link which we are contemplating (assiuming 4.2 is ever released). In general, I have found the service and software people very accommodating, my general impression is that this will be a good product in the near future. For now, I would have to say that I think that they marketed the product a bit too early, and that many of us are now finding the bugs. On the positive side we are ever more hopeful that this will turn out to be a good investment, something of which we were not sure in the first few weeks. Sean McLinden Decision Systems Lab University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine -------