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From: laser-lovers@ucbvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.computers.laser-printers
Subject: Re: ditroff for the Xerox 2700
Message-ID: <8512272208.AA28305@ulysses.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 27-Dec-85 17:08:29 EST
Article-I.D.: ulysses.8512272208.AA28305
Posted: Fri Dec 27 17:08:29 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Dec-85 18:12:00 EST
References: <8512181947.AA06663@oberon.ARPA>
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Approved: laser-lovers@washington.arpa


Our experience has been that getting ditroff to talk nicely to the
2700 is very difficult.  We finally went with a product from Image
Network.  It worked but we decided to junk it since we did not have
the source code.

The 2700 interface has no nice graphics support features.  Instead you
have to draw line segments using characters from a font.  We had some
preliminary graphics support from I.N.  but it almost always hung the
machine and when it did not, the printer ran out of memory.  Any but
the most trivial images will require tremendous amounts of memory on
the 2700 since it can only manipulate fonts, not lines or paths.

Also troff assumes it can access every font on the printer.  For the
2700 this means that you cannot have any plug-in cartriges in the
printer when you are using troff.  If you then try to print normal
jobs, you must download the fonts that used to be in the cartridges
from the host.  Throughput is significantly affected.

Good Luck but I doubt the results will be worth the effort.

    -csw