> > [If you have a spare week or two, I'll send you a ray tracing program > > written in PostScript (allows you to render shiny glass balls using > > nothing but the CPU in your printer. Guaranteed to make you the most > > unpopular person in your entire office when you monopolize the laser > > printer for DAYS at a time to produce single pages of output.... > > 8-)). ] > > Unfortunately, if you do your PS-to-printer-raster conversion in > GhostScript on the host, it doesn't take nearly so long.
That's cheating, though. 8-) > > They also go away with a power-cycle of the > > printer, so you pretty much have to assume you're going to send the > > font > > down to the printer with every job. > > But again, even 10Mbps Ethernet, or even 1Mbps USB 1.0 means that > it's not a big deal to do so, and it does not take long. Not like it > was with a 9600bps parallel connection. I'd still argue that it's significant, if there are enough users doing it. A 14 pt PCL font is about 4.5K (remember, it's a complete bitmap of all 255 characters in the font with a 25x25 matrix). For one user, it doesn't matter. For a few hundred users, that font data starts to add up. It's also more significant if there's a WAN link between the source and the printer. The issue of data transfer was one of the reasons why PostScript level 2 was forced to be 8 bit clean -- the original level 1 permitted only 7 bit data, and transmitting two and three character di- or tri-graphs to get 8 bit data or image rasters -- sometimes as many as 6-10 characters to describe a symbol name -- adds up. Bandwidth may be inexpensive, but that's still no reason to waste it gratuitously. -- db
