Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Pre RIPing a document? (off topic)
From: PayPC System Mail Subscriber (spammail@quanta.paypc.com)
Date: Fri Nov 06 1998 - 05:50:28 EST
Douglas M. MacFarlane said in Re: [netatalk-admins] Pre RIPing a document?
(off topic) at 06/Nov/1998 (Fri) 06:36:29.
> On Wed, 4 Nov 1998, Jonathan Benson wrote:
> > [...]
> > I know I can upgrade the onboard memory to improve the speed but I have
> > recently seen a Color photocopier/printer arrangement from Xerox (costs
> > far too much money) that has a server between the user and the printer.
> > The server pre RIPs the documents as well as caching them in a print
> > queue.
>[...]
> In the case of those printers, I don't think there is any way to
> bypass the PS processing, and the size of the raster image would be
> HUGE!! so that the time it took to send it ould be longer than the
> onboard ripping.
Indeed, it would be enormous... unless you could exploit embedded PS raster
compression, but I'd hate to even guess about if all of this hand-waving
improve speed rather than diminish it.
Oddly enough, the "primitive" LaserWriter 300SC (SCSI, no Postscript) would
be absolutely perfect for what you want to do (RIP on Linux, blast imaging
data to printer).
I recall buying that printer almost exclusively for a job I was doing that
made heavy use of 300dpi bitmaps.... (no need for PS at all, just Raster
Blaster those bits' asses to the printer as fast as possible)... was an
awesome setup.... max out the engine printing speeds on things that'd tie up
the THEN top-of-the-line NTX for minutes.
Heheh.
Incidentally... I use a lot of HP Laserjet 4s here, which I've setup on
TCP/IP just fine (MacOS 8.x can use 'em as LPR *OR* Appletalk devices... and
here's an interesting thing I've exploited. HP's speak PCL as well as PS, of
course. I use HylaFax as mainly an incoming fax pool/archiver/distributor...
and when I print out the faxes... rather than tiff2ps -2a'ing the fax
images, I wrote a small tiff2pcl compressor (HP has something called "FASST"
(sic) which is a bitmap compressor for PCL... it sped up printing of "busy"
faxes to like 1 second, rather than 70-100 seconds (per PAGE). My code
exploits the 600dpi of the printer, and the fact that fax dpi is "close
enough" to an even division of that dpi to not worry about "proper" scaling.
I cast the dpi to 200dpi (original's 204), and encode the bits without
modification as 200dpi into FASST streams, and blast it forth to the HP via
lpr (TCP/IP)... very high quality results [maybe 2% of the faxes which are
"full" to every edge get a little cropped, but I don't mind re-printing those
the "slow" way].
The encoding process on a 200Mhz K6 is less than a second for 5 page faxes...
and I do it in two stages.... tiff2bin (bin is the raw packed bit format HP's
FASST encoder expects), then bin2FASST it (which uses four different adaptive
'nyms to efficiently pack rasters... it's quite good (has primitives for
scanline replication, etc).
I know I know, this isn't a MacOS issue, but I'm pointing out that while PS
is awesome for vector, typographic, etc.... it's like superslow and
"unnecessary" for much of the bitmap imaging I encounter in the "real world".
=Rob=
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