[Coco] Re: M.E.S.S. Printing

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 20 December 2003 08:16, John E. Malmberg wrote:
>KnudsenMJ at aol.com wrote:
>> In a message dated 12/19/03 6:10:14 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>> wb8tyw at qsl.net
>>
>> writes:
>>>Of course I am more interested in open formats instead of
>>> proprietary formats.
>>
>> Well, apparently there are books available which document GIF and
>> BMP standards, which means they're not really proprietary.
>
>BMP is pretty much an open format, as are most of the simple bit map
>storage modes.  GIF was very popular until Compuserve tried to sue
> and collect royalties on their patent, at which point it appears
> that a large number of sites totally banned GIFs to prevent being
> liable for the royalties.

Just to set the record straight, it wasn't Compuserve sueing, they 
were the defendant when Unisys came calling.  It may be that they in 
turn tried to pass some of the settlement costs on to the gif user at 
the time, and that also contributed to the rapid development of PNG 
and friends.  In the ensueing years while we waited out the patent, 
Unisys was so inept that you could call them, talk to the legal dept  
and get an ok for what you were doing (but they would never ever send 
a cover letter saying so in print), and then get a C&D letter from 
their attorny's, often much later, after the coder had put extensive 
amounts of time into his implementation.  Unisys were being, in every 
essense of the word, a bunch of jerks who had no idea what either 
hand was doing.  Several amiga coders got burnt on that.

>> Open formats are nice, but that pretty much sticks you with Linux,
>> while in the real world we have to deal with getting stuff done in
>> Windows or (talk about proprietary non-standards) Mac.
>
>For COCO work, most of the simpler well known formats would probably
>work.  PDF is way too complex for storing COCO images, aside from it
>being an Adobe proprietary format.

But, the reference manual is freely downloadable from their site, John 
and I actually have a home printed copy of 1.2, now a bit old since 
1.3 is out, 408 pages :-) AFAIK, there is no reason one couldn't take 
that manual as a reference, and write clean room code to do it.  
However, because the pdf format is a random access file format, there 
would be quite a bit more disk activity involved in doing it on a 
coco since you might run into a format command 14 megs into the file 
that references a definition defined in the first kilobyte of the 
file.  And which your program has thrown away everything but the 
index marker into the file for that define due to lack of memory, so 
it would have to go back and get it.

I'd suspect that for per page rendering times, it could run toward 
hours on a coco.  Back when I had the amiga running, there were times 
when it took 20 minutes to spit out a page with mostly pictures on 
it, this on a 25mhz 68040 with 64 megs of dram to play in.  Even here 
on this 1450mhz athlon with half a gig of dram, the printer 
occasionally stumbles for a few seconds waiting on gs to give it 
another chunk of data via the usb port.

Scaling those times back to the coco's speed has pretty much deflated 
any interest I may have had in atempting a ghostscript compile on the 
coco.  The current ESP-GS v7.07 home built binary installed on this 
machine is a bit over 21 megs.  But, I haven't stripped the device 
list down to just my printers either.  That would probably cut it in 
half as the default list is extensive indeed.

[root at coyote root]# ls -l `which gs`
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root     21732403 Nov 17 23:11 
/usr/local/bin/gs

which pretty well reduces any interest I might have started out with 
to the vanishing point.

xpdf, which is a pdf to ps translator, is a bit smaller:
[root at coyote root]# ls -l `which xpdf`
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root      1096569 Jul 10 07:53 /usr/bin/xpdf

at nearly 11 megs.  That may not be the latest version extant.  And as 
we all know, this stuff always grows with time. :(

>-John
>wb8tyw at qsl.net
>Personal Opinion Only

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III at 500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP at 1400mhz  512M
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Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.