Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site uw-beaver Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxb!mhuxn!mhuxm!mhuxj!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!laser-lovers From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers Subject: Re: PostScript printers vs. ImPress printers Message-ID: <590@uw-beaver> Date: Sat, 26-Jan-85 03:01:58 EST Article-I.D.: uw-beave.590 Posted: Sat Jan 26 03:01:58 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 28-Jan-85 07:37:17 EST Sender: daemon@uw-beaver Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 40 From: Clive Dawson Brian-- One of the things you mentioned in your message was that Impress has the ability to deallocate memory for no-longer-needed fonts. This works quite well on the old Imprint-10 printer, but has apparently been disabled on the new 8/300's. The result is that glyphs will continue to be down-line loaded to the printer until it runs out of memory. After that, you lose; any new glyphs that must be sent will simply show up as small boxed question-marks (i.e. undefined glyphs). The story I got from Imagen on this is that the 8/300 is actually running two processes-- one which receives the data from the host and stores the glyphs and does some of the page setup, and another which sends the pages off to the print engine. If you watch the 8/300's terminal output, you will note that that the first process can actually be several pages ahead of the second process. In any case, deleting glyphs turned out to be too hard because there was apparently no way to know whether the printing process was really finished with a glyph or not. Our users have quickly learned that long documents which use a variety of different characters in non-standard fonts, even if few and far between, have a high probability of eventually losing. The solution is to split up the document and print the pieces in several different jobs. One reason we may notice this more than others is that we ordered our 8/300 with a serial interface which comes standard with 512K bytes of memory. If you order an Ethernet interface, enough extra memory comes with the printer that running out of glyph space is apparently much less common. We will probably be ordering more memory for our printer anyway, which will not only help this problem but also allow us to print full bit-mapped screen images from our Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machines. At the moment the printer won't even hold half the image before running out of room. Cheers, Clive -------