Subject: [netatalk-admins] Downloading fonts.
From: Stew Benedict (stewb@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Mar 01 1999 - 19:45:43 EST
Sorry I deleted the original message. The person was talking about a
couple of problems printing.
1) Not being able to print more than 1 file at a time: This is definitely
not a unix-side problem. The only time I've ever had a problem printing
multiple files is if I happen to consume all the space in the "/"
directory. I haven't really tried this from the Mac side, I was happy to
be able to print at all :^).
2) Downloading fonts: This is where your .ppd or print drivers should come
in. Most well-behaved applications will work with the OS and the print
driver and pass whatever information is need for the particular printer,
based on it's capabilities. If the font is not resident in the printer,
then it should be passed as part of the job. Using tools such as
font downloaders, can reduce the size of subsequent jobs being sent. I'm
interested in this too, as I'm writing an app in Tcl/Tk that does music
notation, with a custom font. Tcl/Tk has no print capability yet, but I
can save my canvas as an EPS file. Then you need to use ghostscript or
something similar to pass it on to the printer. If the printer is
postscript, I should be able to pass the font info along with the EPS and
bypass ghostscript. I've got several postscript books, and they talk
about downloading fonts, I just haven't worked out the details yet.
Ghostscript works fine, but it introduces quite a bit of overhead on the
Mac, greatly increasing the file size from about 20K to 500K and crashes
occasionally. I'm also using ghostscript on the Linux server to act as a
filter to let the Mac print to my HP 693C. On the mac side, I tell it
it's a LaserWriter Color 12, and let ghostscript under Linux generate the
PCL using the pipe command in papd.conf. This is working out well so far.
Why don't you send me one of your problem EPS files and I can take a look
at what information is contained in it? I'm pretty comfortable with
postscript.
Stew Benedict
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sat Dec 18 1999 - 16:16:22 EST