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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Re: PostScript hackery (getting fonts out of your printer)
Message-ID: <1428@uw-beaver>
Date: Wed, 24-Jul-85 15:39:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1428
Posted: Wed Jul 24 15:39:09 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Jul-85 04:14:05 EDT
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 39

From: Christopher A Kent <cak@Purdue.EDU>

Apparently I didn't make myself very clear in my original message.
Allow me to try again:

Purdue has this stylized griffin as its logo; I'd like to print it on
our PostScript printers' banner page for each job. I've already scanned
it for another project, and have it at about 300 dpi resolution, on
disk. The question is how best to load this into the printer and print
it; "best" in this case means "fastest."

I started off by using the Cookbook example of user-defined fonts to
define my own font based on the scanned image -- using imagemask, as is
done for the turkey character. I load the font definition code (and the
scanned image) into system VM, so it is only sent down once per
power-cycle. Then my banner program merely does a getfont scalefont
setfont and prints the appropriate character.

The problem is that printing the character, even when it's already
loaded into the printer, takes quite a while. This is apparently (based
on experiments involving printing the griffin at various point sizes)
because the printer scales and bit smooths the character every time;
it's a large character, printed infrequently, so it's probably never in
the cache.

I'm happy with the digitization, and don't need to have the image
smoothed. I'm looking for a way to trick the font machinery into not
smoothing the image every time, but just copying the bits I loaded onto
the page (or into the cache) as fast as it can.

Studying the manual last night leads me to believe that I may have gone
about this whole thing in the wrong way -- what I'm going to try today
is a routine that just prints the griffin using imagemask, save that
routine in system VM, and have the banner routine invoke that one. Then
it should end up as just a straight bitcopy (I hope.)

Cheers,
chris
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