[SunRescue] What Gem did I find?

[James Lockwood]

On Sat, 24 Mar 2001 dave at cca.org wrote:

> jon at jonworld.com writes:
> 
> >That stinks-- that's what 'winprinters' do today and those stink. I like

Ok, _why_ does it stink?  Because it can potentially make printers cheaper
and faster?  Because rather than being forced to deal with Postscript
rendering bugs in firmware they can be corrected in software?

> I have mixed feelings about PS on the printer. For most files, it's killer,
> but for some things it's better to run postscript on your host and have
> a dumb-frame-buffer style printer.

Agreed.

The original SPARCprinter is an excellent example.  The engine is 400dpi
and capable of shooting pages through at 12ppm, but in 1991 building a
renderer on the printer capable of processing Postscript at that rate
would have cost a fortune.

With rendering on the host you moved the bottleneck, the overhead in
blitting the bitmap out the video port only amounted to a second or two
even for a completely full page.  With a modern fast machine rendering the
Postscript you can sustain a full 12ppm regardless of the content or size
of the pages.  There's no memory limit to the rendering engine which
normally plagues older printers.

-James