SUMMARY: NeWSprint, SPARCprinter - any good? (l

[Joe Habermann]

Here is the summary of the replies to my request for opinions on the
SPARCprinter and NeWSPrint software.  Thanks to all who responded:

	hr at sirius.astro.uiuc.edu (Harold Ravlin)
	brsmith at cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith)
	ekrell at ulysses.att.com (Eduardo Krell)
	TOMP at YALEVM.BITNET (Thomas Plunkett)
	iapsd!hopi!glenn at uunet.UU.NET (Glenn Herteg)
	ehrlich at psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Dan Ehrlich)
	hr at sirius.astro.uiuc.edu (Harold Ravlin)
	intran!clam!dale at uunet.UU.NET (Dale Mensch)
	doug at perry.Berkeley.EDU (Doug Neuhauser)
	wes at thor.srl.caltech.edu (Wes Boudville)

Catch-all disclaimer: To the best of my knowledge, each of these people
speak for themselves and not for their respective organizations.

Joe Habermann
haberman at msi.umn.edu

>o Do the printer+workstation really do 12 ppm consistently even on
>  complicated PostScript?  (I saw this claim in an article.)

X-From: intran!clam!dale at uunet.UU.NET (Dale Mensch):

Nope.  I've never seen that claimed, either.  The print engine will run 12
ppm.  NOTHING can print "even complicated PostScript" at 12 ppm.

X-From: hr at sirius.astro.uiuc.edu (Harold Ravlin):

Once the printer starts cranking, a print job usually comes out at the
rate of one page/5-6 seconds. I suppose more complicated pages could take
longer, but most things I've seen are that fast.

X-From: brsmith at cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith):

Yes, on a SPARCstation 1+ with 16meg of RAM.  (With or without a window
system running.) No, on a SPARCstation 1+ with only 8meg of RAM.  (And one
user running sunview and FrameMaker.)

X-From: ekrell at ulysses.att.com (Eduardo Krell):

Yes, the printer does keep printing 12 ppm even with complicated graphics.

X-From: TOMP at YALEVM.BITNET (Thomas Plunkett):

It does print near the 12ppm mark, even with complicated postscript.  The
images being generated are Siesmological plots (FYI).  Relatively
complicated PS, and the SPARCprinter handles the work adequately.

X-From: iapsd!hopi!glenn at uunet.UU.NET (Glenn Herteg):

[I can't speak for the SPARCprinter, but I can talk about NeWSprint:]
(1) Seems fast enough for general use.  Very slow, though, to handle
    raster images (e.g., Sun rasterfiles), even when asked to do
    bit-for-bit printing.  On the other hand, a PostScript printer
    connected over a serial line would have a different kind of
    bottleneck. (...)
(3) Startup time for NeWSprint seems to be quite long, though the
    printing speed once it's rolling is okay. (...)
(6) At this price, why do you care about constant 12 ppm output?  I'd say
    it works very well now, and with a round of software bug fixes it
    will be essentially unbeatable.  It beats most 8 ppm printers, and
    the real competition will be the next round of Adobe-PostScript
    Level 2 printers, which aren't out yet.

X-From: ehrlich at psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Dan Ehrlich):

I bought NeWSprint so I could drive a Versatec color electrostatic plotter
so I can not speak to the SPARCprinter's performance.

ME: Incendentally, the article that I refer to in my question may be found
in SunExpert, March 1991 Vol. 2 Num. 3 page 54 in an article about printer
options for Suns.  Not a terrible article.

>o Have you found that the system is able to handle most PostScript
>  that you've thrown at it?

X-From: brsmith at cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith):

Pretty much.  We haven't had any repeatable problems with FrameMaker
output or text files.  I have found a core file, but I couldn't say what
job caused it.

There was a mac document, though, that contained a blank page (lord knows
why).  The blank page put the postscript interpreter into an (apparent)
infinite loop.  I managed to print all the rest of the document.

X-From: ekrell at ulysses.att.com (Eduardo Krell):

I have had some problems with PostScript files which print ok on our PS
printers but fail on the SPARCprinter. I think Sun has patches available
for the NeWSprint software, but I haven't received them yet.

X-From: TOMP at YALEVM.BITNET (Thomas Plunkett):

We have found that SUN is a little "behind" in their support of the
printer. We are printing to the SPARCprinter from a MAC, the directions
for NEWSprint say this is possible, but it took time.  I won't go into the
problems, but I will tell you the solution, which is a simple one.

You must use the LaserPrep 6.1 to print MAC PostScript succesfully.  I
ended up setting up CAP 6.0 on the IPC to allow AppleTalk service to the
MACs, and by adding the LaserPrep 6.1 to the CAP LWSRV filter, it works
great!  Everything is printing to the server, and all users are happy.

X-From: iapsd!hopi!glenn at uunet.UU.NET (Glenn Herteg):

NeWSprint inherits all NeWS bugs.  Perhaps not too serious, but I've run
into some myself.  OpenWindows 3 is supposed to be a bug-fix release, so
that may fix most of such problems.

X-From: ehrlich at psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Dan Ehrlich):

We have come across one or two examples that cause XNeWS to core dump.
These have been sent off to Sun for analysis.  XNeWS is very particular in
regards to a postscript program following the structured comments that
define page boundries and such.  I am not really a postscript wizard so I
just sent the offending program to my Sun SE.

X-From: hr at sirius.astro.uiuc.edu (Harold Ravlin):

Yes and no. Most Postscript we use is either lpr, the enscript command
from Transcript or dvitps from the contrib directory of the TeX
distribution.  Most things seem to work. However, dvitps is using the
Adobe .afm files as reference, but the SPARCprinter uses its own. Persons
requesting Postcript fonts from TeX find that the text drifts left or
right by about a 1/2 character per line. I don't know how to convert Sun's
fonts to the data needed to dvitps. (The programs are there, but the
formats are currently incompatable.) A number of programs that send images
to the printer get faint lines running across the page. I don't know if it
is a newsprint bug or just a really bad halftoning scheme.

X-From: intran!clam!dale at uunet.UU.NET (Dale Mensch):

Yep.  Since it's not Adobe, there are some differences.  The most
noticable is in fountains: NeWS puts out a sort of dithered effect at the
pale end of a fountain, where Adobe kind of gives up and puts out
exponentially-spaced dotted lines.  The only noticeable flaw I've seen is
some bezier line ending connections within characters that are huge,
graduated tints, eg:

/iterate {25} def
(abcdefg) true charpath 
stroke
iterate -2 0
{
	/loop_var exch def
	gsave
		1 loop_var iterate div sub setgray
		loop_var setlinewidth
		stroke
	grestore

X-From: wes at thor.srl.caltech.edu (Wes Boudville):

I recently installed Newsprint on a sun4, writing to an HP 3 printer.  I
encountered similiar problems. One of our users made a graph using Excel
on a PC to generate a Postscript file. He sent this to the sun4 & thence
to the printer.  The top halves of the labels were omitted, and spurious
vertical gaps appeared in the histogram. Axes numbers were also
incorrectly placed. The same file was sent to another sun that had an
Apple laserwriter and wasn't using Newsprint. It gave correct output.

In another case, a user ran a graphical program called mongo on a sun.  It
made a Postscript file. This was sent to the HP via Newsprint.  The errors
here were subtler, but still apparent. The ends of the axes ticks were
misaligned by ~ 1 pixel. And the labels looked smudged - almost every
character had misplaced pixels.  Sending this file to the Apple & not
using Newsprint produced correct results.

I informed Dan Quinn of Sun about this. He was very helpful. I emailed the
Postscript files to him. He found that sending these via Newsprint to a
Sparcprinter also gave the same problems.  This isolated the problem to
the Newsprint software. Because now the printers had been varied, and the
input software making Postscript was from 2 different sources. He filed 2
bug reports with Sun Engineering. Sometime in the future, they'll fix it.

>o Is the SparcStation printer host overly weighed down by performing
>  the raster-image processing?  Is it very noticeable to a user
>  working on the workstation?

X-From: brsmith at cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith):

Not noticable to OUR users, but I can tell when a print job hits.  You
suddenly have a cpu-bound job running flat out, with the usual crunch on
window drawing, etc.  They don't last long, though.

X-From: ekrell at ulysses.att.com (Eduardo Krell):

I have it on a SPARCstation 2 and I don't feel any performance degradation
when I use it (but I do hear the local disk seeking all over the place).
We are using an IPC as the print server, and there is no noticable
degradation of performance on the system when output is sent from another
machine on our network to the printer.

X-From: TOMP at YALEVM.BITNET (Thomas Plunkett):

We are using an IPC as the print server, and there is no noticable
degradation of performance on the system when output is sent from another
machine on our network to the printer.

X-From: ehrlich at psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Dan Ehrlich):

It does not seem to bother my 4/490, :-), too much.  The Versatec is
connected to a VME controller on the 4/490.

X-From: hr at sirius.astro.uiuc.edu (Harold Ravlin):

Sun claims that the printer will take up to 25% of the workstation. Since
we don't print continuously (although I think the students try), I don't
see it as being much of a problem, but then its not my workstation.  (The
printer itself doesn't care, everything is a bitstream).

X-From: intran!clam!dale at uunet.UU.NET (Dale Mensch):

Better have at LEAST 16MB of real memory

>o Have you had any h/w problems with the SPARCprinter itself?  Is it
>  noisy?

X-From: ekrell at ulysses.att.com (Eduardo Krell):

The NeWSprint software doesn't work when the spool directory is NFS
mounted (rather, when the directory where the software keeps the temporary
files for doing the rendering is NFS mounted). I've been told to install
the NFS jumbo patch. I did that on the SS2, but it didn't make any
difference.  Maybe the patch needs to be installed on the server, but I
haven't done that yet.

X-From: iapsd!hopi!glenn at uunet.UU.NET (Glenn Herteg):

(5) I wouldn't rcommend installing the SPARCprinter on a machine with
    only a local 105-Megabyte disk.  There are various intermediate files
    generated during raster image conversion that may overflow the disk,
    if it's reasonably full to start with, even though the printer
    installation script supposedly tries to insure there is enough space.

X-From: hr at sirius.astro.uiuc.edu (Harold Ravlin):

Try listening to an Apple LaserWriter about 20,000 sheets passed the need
for a major overhaul! I would rate the SPARCprinter as not a noisy laser
printer. The cable is several feet long so the printer doesn't have to be
right next to the SS.

X-From: intran!clam!dale at uunet.UU.NET (Dale Mensch):

No.  It's largely soundless until it prints.  The paper advance noise
seems a little louder than 8ppm Canon engines, but it might just be the
perception that the paper is moving faster...

> o In general, would you recommend the system?  Why or why not?

X-From: brsmith at cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith):

Er.... no.  The software is still a bit shaky.

If you have the imaging directory on an NFS partition it will either: Not
print the entire image (Sun's claim; haven't seen it happen) or Hang your
machine (what happened to us - Sun was clueless.) So: You NEED a local
disk on that machine, in addition to at least 12meg.

X-From: doug at perry.Berkeley.EDU (Doug Neuhauser):

1. The idea of using the SPARC engine for PostScript->Raster is a good idea.  
2. I think that their current implementation certainly needs work. (...)
   Lines did not come out with uniform thickness.  "T" intersections did 
   not line up correctly (perhaps due to #1 above). There were "spurious 
   dots" on the the page, which could be also be seen using pageview.
3. IMHO, a write-black engine would be better than a write-white engine.
4. Presumably the  rendering portion (xnews) is given any information
   about the output device resolution, but I don't see anything in the
   .param files for the printer that indicate the engine type (write black
   vs write white).  It DOES make a difference, especially in the
   rendering of small thin fonts.

X-From: TOMP at YALEVM.BITNET (Thomas Plunkett):

Essentially, I am recommending the printer, its only major drawback is the
lack of people at SUN supporting it.  I am sure they will correct this
problem soon.

X-From: ehrlich at psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Dan Ehrlich):

The concept of NeWSprint is appealing if you have a number of raster
marking engines that you want to quickly (i.e. code development time) be
able to get postscript output to.

X-From: hr at sirius.astro.uiuc.edu (Harold Ravlin):

In general, yes I would if you can live with the quirks.  Newsprint was
released with with lots of bugs. Hopefully Sun will spend more effort
fixing them than they have on other unbundled software.