🚀 go-pugleaf

We tried out a Talaris XT2492 for about a month.. The Xerox people were
particularly annoying but we ended up having to get the source for the
Talaris ethernet driver from Talaris and porting the thing to the Apollo.
The port was fairly easy and it only took a few days to get the thing 
working.  However, as others have mentioned, TeX output was incredibly
slow and once it did produce output it wasn't consistent with our 
QMS 810+ (ie: Font substitutions).  I spoke with the people at Talaris
about the speed of the XT2492 and TeX output to which they mentioned 
that they've written a dvi2excl driver which speeds it up incredibly.  I
never bothered trying it out since it seemed sort of stupid to me to have
to run an EXCL driver to bypass the postscript for one application.  Other
applications we've tried are PCB Layouts... One of them was a 5.6MB
postscript file which the printer refused to print.  Our QMS810+ didn't
have too much of a problem with it...  In terms of speed, we thought the
Talaris fell into the "Ridiculously slow" category... 

We ended up returning the Talaris and investing in a DEC PS20 which 
presently boots off our Vax and gets stuff from it via Decnet.  Then
we have a DecStation 3100 that acts as an lpd gateway to it as well
so we can print to it from our TCP/IP hosts.  In the meantime, I've
written a prf->lpd driver for the Apollo so the whole thing looks 
transparent.  The same 5.6MB file that wouldn't print on the Talaris
prints on the PS20 in about 45 minutes which is about as long as it
takes for our QMS 810+... We had a slight problem with TeX in that
dvi2ps puts "Palatino" fonts in the header which the PS20 doesn't
like... We've changed those to "Times" and it's fine... 


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ICBM: 51 03 N / 114 03 W  || Apollo System_Janitor, Novatel Communications
"I spilled spot remover on my dog and now he's gone..." <Steven Wright>