[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 10 January 2014 15:30:30 Aaron Wolfe did opine:

> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:50 PM, George Ramsower <georgera at gvtc.com> 
wrote:
> >> Cocomax, CGDP, ColorMax and other programs printed hi-res (for a
> >> Coco) text
> >> and graphics to a wide range of printers. There's no reason that they
> >> could
> >> not do so today.
> >> 
> >> All that's needed are drivers.
> >> 
> >> ===================================================
> >> 
> >  I have to agree to a point on this. I've built files to print that
> >  were too
> > 
> > large for memory. I saved that file info to the hard disk and then
> > used that file and routed it to the printer. I would think the same
> > thing could be done with one of the modern printers. All that's
> > needed is a utility to convert the info to whatever the printer needs
> > and send that info to a storage device and then send it to the
> > printer as we have time. The conversion would be slow but the actual
> > printing could be as fast as the coco can muster up.
> 
> While technically true, the "problem" is that what the printer needs
> is an enormous (for the coco) amount of information.
> 
> Take a typical color printer in the $50 price range... you're looking
> at 600dpi x 24 bits (rgb) = just about a megabyte of information per
> square inch.
> Over 90MB per page!  My NitrOS9 hard drive is only 64MB (and its
> nowhere near full despite having quite a bit of software installed).
> 
> Assuming you are going to use the bitbanger to print this (and you
> have room/time to generate 90MB of information on your coco), you are
> looking at 7 *days* to transfer this data (at 1200bps, iirc that is
> stock coco printer speed?).

That point cannot be expressed too strongly.

I like doing stuff on the coco because it CAN DO it, but to compare doing a 
1 page printout entirely on the coco, which might take a week, with the 
ability (at least when running nitros9) of dumping an assembly listing that 
is nominally 20 pages of text, something DW can do with a simple "list 
filename >/p" in 30 seconds or so, have that file then sent through cups on 
this linux box, from cups through the printers supplied drivers for that 
printer, and back down the exact same USB extension cable, to the same hub 
that dw's 232-usb adapter is plugged into, and have that laser printer 
blink the lights just noticeably 4 seconds after the coco gave you back a 
prompt, and having that 20 page, still hot printout in you hands 65 seconds 
later, sure ruins any thoughts I may have had about being a purist snd 
making the coco do it.

I am interested in looking at that printout of bootlink with an urgency 
that far exceeds ANY thoughts of spending a year writing a driver to do it 
on the coco.

Get real people, let the machinery that CAN DO IT in a timely manner Just 
Do It!  The coco simply is not that machine given the data size 
requirements of the bit images now being sent to dumb printers.

In the first place, one would need a multigigabyte hard drive just to hold 
the font files once generated to scale since I cannot for the life of me 
concoct but 2 usable font schemes, one of which would be a subset of the 
other.  Truetype can be scaled to any size, as can svg, but the SVG font 
menu is very often just a tiny subset, usually based on Hershey.   But that 
would be the major amount of rendering time, so much so that if I were 
writing the driver, I would have one master copy of each typeface, and 
there are probably 50,000 faces available, and I would keep the scratch 
files so I wouldn't have to re-render to scale, that font the next time it 
was needed.  Those will also take up space on the hard drive.  I could see 
filling up a terrabyte drive in a year or so.  That might even hit the next 
drive size limit in nitros9, a cluster size of 256. By my very rough 
calculations, that is about 34 gigabytes, but I think the real limit is due 
to the size of a seek request, which is more likely 4 gigabytes.

Simply put, the resources to Just Do It, aren't available.  Particularly 
when there probably isn't 2 of us on this list using the same printer as 
another.  That would be a huge undertaking to try and support every $15 ink 
squirter as well as the low end lasers. Almost everyone would need to write 
their own driver.

I don't think for a minute I have enough time left to do that for even one 
printer.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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