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!cbosgd!ihnp4!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!laser-lovers From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers Subject: Re: Printing Mac Postscript File?? (LaserPrep) Message-ID: <1133@uw-beaver> Date: Sun, 5-May-85 21:32:46 EDT Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1133 Posted: Sun May 5 21:32:46 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 7-May-85 22:17:06 EDT Sender: daemon@uw-beaver Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 42 From: Brian Reid There are two different ways that a Mac application program can talk to the LaserWriter. The obvious way is for it to generate PostScript directly; those files do not normally require a header. If an application program does not do anything special, it outputs to the LaserWriter by generating a file that has the syntax of PostScript but the semantics of Apple QuickDraw. In other words, it is a PostScript file that consists of a series of calls on user-defined operators, and each of those operators corresponds to some QuickDraw function. While this scheme can work with no cooperation on the part of the application, it does not produce the most satisfactory results because the semantics of QuickDraw are reasonably device-dependent, and the computation that the LaserWriter needs to perform to emulate them at a pixel resolution that is not an integer multiple of the screen resolution can be substantial. There is a header file (that gets downloaded into the LaserWriter as part of its initialization sequence) that defines all of the operators that are needed for QuickDraw emulation. It is not application-dependent, and it is site-dependent only in that it contains the server loop exit password for the LaserWriter, so if you have changed the password on your LaserWriter from the default password of 0000000, you will have to edit the header file to reflect that new password (the server loop password is the first 7 characters of the file). It would be a fairly simple matter to modify that header file so that it could be used as a genuine prefix to each file that is printed, rather than being downloaded into the printer outside of the server loop (where it will stay until the printer is rebooted). I am enquiring as to whether or not the contents of this header file are proprietary to either Apple or Adobe. I can't imagine that they are proprietary, but I want to check anyhow. If the file is not proprietary I will happily send a copy of it out to the net (it is 40K characters, of which 19K are the actual definitions and the rest are comments and documentation that should be stripped from it before you actually use it.) Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA