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From: fouts@orville.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Laser printer
Message-ID: <324@ames.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Feb-87 12:25:37 EST
Article-I.D.: ames.324
Posted: Fri Feb 13 12:25:37 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 14-Feb-87 22:54:24 EST
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Reply-To: fouts@orville.UUCP (Marty Fouts)
Distribution: comp
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 25

Wait a minute, before we all cover our selves with napalm and light
matches: the (speed) relationship between traverse a display list and
blast a bit map is not a strict ordering.

In part it depends on what you are measuring.  One set of measurements
is the device's ability to draw the page from the description.  It is
always true that it is faster to print a bitmap then to print a
display list using this measurement, because all raster printout ends up
being print the bit map, which means that print the display list
requires translate the display list to a bit map and print it.  Since
translate takes a positive amount of time, it takes longer.

However, it is sometimes more interesting to measure how long it takes
to print a page from the point of view of a device (such as the ST)
which has to transmit the page to be printed.  In this case,
communications costs have to be included.  There are some cases where
sending a postscript description to a slow interpretter can take less
time per page than sending bitmaps, and some where it can't.  It
depends on the relitive speeds of the interpretter and the
communications channel, and the degree of complexity of the image.

Sometimes the complexity wins for the display list, because the amount
of information is small compared to a bit map, so that communication
time dominates; but sometimes it loses, because the effort to
translate is large compared to both.