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Newsgroups: comp.laser-printers
Subject: Re: PostScript vs DDL vs Interpress (was PostSript Printers)
Message-ID: <8704171636.AA10486@brillig.umd.edu>
Date: Fri, 10-Apr-87 18:59:01 EST
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Posted: Fri Apr 10 18:59:01 1987
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    Since there are few people who have actually seen an Interpress and/or DDL
    printer, it's hard for anyone to say anything that isn't based on some
    manufacturer's claim or second-hand knowledge.

I think Interpress printers have been on the market since 1982.
We got our Xerox 8046 in January, 1985.

    [...]  Xerox says that Interpress is designed for speed and is faster than
    PostScript.  Considering that the only version of Interpress that's
    available now doesn't do graphics, only text and scanned images (no
    vector graphics, clipping, or rotation of text), I can see why it's fast.

Ours does vector graphics, clipping, rotation of text, and a few other
things.  It does have a few weaknesses.  Text can be rotated only in
the case that the printer possesses pre-rotated font files.  (But how
often do you use fonts at rotations other than 90 degrees?)  It doesn't
do arbitrary curves.  Our Xerox workstation software computes the
arbitrary curves and uses line graphics to render them...a kludge, but
users don't care where the math is done.  (We use Interpress 2; not 3.)

I wouldn't say that the 8046 is a fast printer.

For speed we (Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab) use 7 Imagen laser
printers, all on ethernet.  All of them (8/300, 12/300, 3320) generally
operate at the rated speed of the print engines (8, 12, and 20 ppm).

    Re: DDL--

I think DDL was invented mainly in the hope of chilling postscript.
Back when the LaserWriter was the only PS machine on the market and
Imagen was touting the 3320 and DDL, we decided to give PS a miss and
buy the 3320 since the speed of the Apple was too low and, well, DDL
was going to be even better than PS, right?  As it turns out, DDL is
not available on the 3320.  (I re-read my junk mail, and, sure enough,
Imagen never actually promised that DDL would run on any of their extant
laser printers; just that it was a better PDL than PS.)  I called
Imagen when the 3320 arrived and they said that they had no plans
ever to support DDL on the IP/II series of printers.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicated that the Impress page
description language (supported on all Imagen IP/II products) is
adequate for 99.6% of the half million pages we print each year, so
I still believe we went with the right product, if not my favorite
PDL (which is, in fact Postscript).  To accomodate the 0.4% of the
print jobs that require PS, we bought a LaserWriter and that, in turn,
encouraged some people to switch from other drawing tools to MacDraw,
and now 0.8% of our print jobs go out in PS.  The overwhelming majority
of our users (probably more impatient than the average, since many
were weaned on 60 ppm Xerox dovers) prefer speed to the potential
of arbitrarily transformed fonts, etc..

I sure wish Imagen would offer a Postscript emulator for the IP/II
series of printers.  Then (I think) we'd have the best of all worlds.
--Christopher Schmidt
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