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From: DRF@SU-SCORE.ARPA (David Fuchs)
Newsgroups: mod.computers.laser-printers
Subject: Re: Printing DVI on a Xerox 2700
Message-ID: <12175842371.19.DRF@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 16-Jan-86 22:39:45 EST
Article-I.D.: SU-SCORE.12175842371.19.DRF
Posted: Thu Jan 16 22:39:45 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Jan-86 11:18:58 EST
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Sorry, but excusing the 2700 based on how long it's been out is simply
not historically accurate.  Imagen was delivering systems many months
before the 2700, and QMS came out at around the same time.  Neither the
QMS nor the Imagen was hobbled the way the 2700 was.

"No other laser printer that costs even half as much has any of these
problems" of course meant "...that costs as little as half as much..."
I didn't want anyone to think I was talking about the various cheap-o
daisy-wheel replacement laser printers that are now available.  The
point was that QMS and Imagen printers cost about the same amount back
then as the 2700, and nowadays DEC and Apple and HP and QMS and Imagen
and &c. all have good printers at as little as half the price of a 2700.

The hack of using a font with a number of different space characters
of various widths doesn't really solve the 2700 problem, since the
limit of number of characters that can appear on a page is so severe
that you find that you can't use enough of them to position the
visible characters properly.

Scribe can handle the 2700 because Scribe was designed to also be able
to cope with line printers and daisy-wheel printers.  Scribe knows
ahead of time that its output is headed for a less-flexible output
device, and adjusts spacing accordingly.  Scribe ouput on the 2700
just isn't as nicely spaced as on other laser printers.  There are
some folks who manage to distort TeX output sufficiently so that it
(sometimes) can be printed on the 2700, but it's not a pretty sight.

So I stand by my previous flame.  And if you want to get TeX output
from your Prime, you might start by fixing the Pascal compiler...
	-david
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