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!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!ittvax!dcdwest!sdcsvax!sdcrdcf!hplabs!tektronix!uw-beaver!laser-lovers From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers Subject: Postscript bugs Message-ID: <583@uw-beaver> Date: Fri, 25-Jan-85 20:34:25 EST Article-I.D.: uw-beave.583 Posted: Fri Jan 25 20:34:25 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 31-Jan-85 01:24:32 EST Sender: daemon@uw-beaver Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 30 From: Ken Olum As I understand it the Postscript language does not have ANY FACILITY WHATSOEVER for dealing with any kind of bitmap. You can't download fonts in bitmap format, nor can you download rasters such as screen images. As far as I am concerned, this makes such a printer well-nigh useless. On the other hand it depends a lot on your application. It would really be much nicer if Post script dominated other languages completely. It would also help Adobe sell their printers. Does anyone know the story on getting Metafont fonts into a Postscript printer? I have heard a rumor that there exists a program that will do this, on the other hand I've heard another rumor that no program has ever been written to get the spline-representation out of Metafont, which would seem to be a prerequisite. In regards to the supposed advantages of Postscript, converting splines to rasters is *SLOW* and presumably makes the printer much slower than the basic print-rate of the interface when doing something complicated although I don't have any timing figures. In addition the a spline-to-raster has parameters (e.g. how much darkness to turn on the bit) and better fonts can be produced if these parameters are twiddled, presumably based on the print engine. Having all this stuff done in ROM keeps you from being able to deal with it in any way. I don't see having the fonts in ROM as a feature -- we have a Symbolics LGP for which we use entirely downloaded fonts and the speed of the engine still dominates the speed of the download. On the other hand the LaserWriter is supposed to go on a serial interface which would be a lot slower (also error-prone -- do they have a reliable protocol for it?). Ken