Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!rutgers!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!bob+
From: bob+@andrew.cmu.edu (Bob Sidebotham)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Host software alternatives to PS engines?
Message-ID: <AXA4Jay00VsMI1MUcA@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 15 Sep 88 22:34:14 GMT
Organization: Carnegie Mellon
Lines: 25

For people with relatively modest volume printing requirements, it would seem
ideal to be able to buy a cheap printing engine, without PostScript support,
and do the PostScript to raster conversion in the host computer.  Does anyone
know if there is any such product on the market, or anticipated to be?  If
someone could build an effective implementation of this software, I'm sure it
would have a ready market.  Given the existence of Display PostScript and other
PostScript interpretors, it seems that it might almost be possible to build
something like this with off-the-shelf components.  I'd even be willing to buy
such a package from Adobe, if they charged a reasonable price and didn't try to
bundle too many high-priced fonts with it.

I'm assuming that dumb printers are available that can actually be hooked up to
your machine:  I'm told that (1) Canon laser printing engines can be had for as
little as $900 and (2) the Mac's SCSI bus is fast enough to drive the laser
printer directly.  I don't know whether a dumb-enough interface is available
for the printer, however (that is, an interface without any added-value (diablo
mode, etc.) to drive it's price up).

Is there something technically wrong with this suggestion?

Bob Sidebotham
Carnegie Mellon University

P.S. I sent out a variant of this post some time ago, but haven't seen it.  I
assume it was lost.