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Excerpts from netnews.comp.lang.postscript: 20-Feb-90 Re: Bitmap of
PostScript co.. Glenn Reid@heaven.woodsi (3415)

> ..... but that bitmaps are really pretty big, heavy, ugly, and
useless things, for most purposes.....

> Adobe didn't implement any but very specialized, undocumented ways of
> prying the bitmap out of the printer because there are very few worthwhile
> uses for it, other than feeding to another printer of exactly the same
> characteristics, in which case you're better off with the PostScript
stream anyway.

Admitted, but one really nice feature would be to store them on a disk
to cache the bitmaps and allow multiple processors to work on a spooling
queue for a printer. The idea is to do the next thing:

Suppose you have a (hypothetical) fast printing engine, say 100 pages a
minute for raw speed. Normally you have one postscript engine, and now
look at the speed you will get in the end. Well, since postscript is
interpreted, fonts might not be in the cache etc, it takes a while for
the pages to be processed. What is really frustrating is that you now
know that the printer can run on 100 pages a minute (you checked this
with fooling around with #copies) and you actually will see 30 pages a
minute or so. It is easy to imagen a setup where you have a couple of
processors with (quite) some disc space. Each individual job is directed
to a different proccessor, the bitmaps are stored to disk and the
printer can be fed with the bitmaps at full speed (after which the
bitmaps are removed) with the bitmaps of one job while the other jobs in
the queue are calculated. Of course, slightly more complicated setup can
be thought of. Note that I don't propose to take the bitmaps and store
them to a general purpose machine for turning them into group 3 encoding
or other uses. I would consider above described setup as a black box,
just as I consider my current printer as a (whatever colour painted)
black box.

I have heard a rumour that the reason that this is not possible to, do
is due to the fact that the Adobe licencing rules state that the bitmap
is not allowed to survive a power cycle.

	jaap