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In article <2oml2u$jf7@ucunix.san.uc.edu>, egglesnj@ucunix.san.uc.edu (Nick Eggleston) writes:
|> Does anyone know of a way to make the Xerox 4050 printer able
|> to print postscript? Perhaps a postscript to metacode translator?
|> It seems such a waste to only be able to print forms and filler.

We use a Xerox 4050 printer with GHO (Graphics Handling Option) as PostScript
output device. You need this GHO board, otherwise the printer is not able to
process the (compressed) raster images.

Output creation is done via ghostscript, we have modified the
pbm-gs-driver by adding two low level software layers: 

 -1-  a bitmap frame buffer layer (used for bitmap rotation and enlargement
      of black runs, see below)

 -2-  a raster compression layer which produces RES (Xerox raster encoding 
      standard) image files from bitmaps

all functions are written in C, the ghostscript program (version 2.6.1) 
runs under SGI IRIX, AIX and HP-UX (9.0), the layer packages are also 	
available for MVS (C-370), LINUX, Ultrix. All is free software, so you
won't have to pay for it, if you want to use it.

There were two main problems with the 4050 printer:

 -1- Internally, the 4050 bitmap addressing mode is landscape, so you have
     to rotate bitmaps, which costs 1/2 ... 2 seconds per page. This rotation
     is done in the low level bitmap frame buffer layer.

 -2- Because the 4050 laser beam "writes" the white areas of the paper (i.e.,
     the areas that are not covered with toner), a bitmap normally looks much
     "lighter" than the same bitmap processed by "black area writers" 
     (e.g. HP laserjet). We solved this problem by enlarging all black runs
     by a certain number of pixels (horizontally and vertically). The number
     of additional pixels is controlled by an environment variable.

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