🚀 go-pugleaf

In comp.fonts you write:

>We have a Linotronic typesetter at University of Toronto and I would
>be interested in hearing about user experiences with TeX and high 
>resolution output devices.

Well, I don't have experience with TeX in particular but I do have
experience with the Linotronic in combination with downloaded fonts.
In particular, we have a collection bitmap fonts in PostScript format
at 720 dpi used to print house style publications. When processing
those jobs on the Linotronic we also did run out of memory.

>In particular jobs fail regularly with a VM Error (out of memory) and
>I am interested in hearing of others with similar experience and of ANY
>possible solutions to this. 

The solution I came up with was to write some kind of "garbage collector".
The garbage collector will do a "vmstatus" each time a new font
is created. If the memory drops down a certain value (I took as
threshold 250000 bytes) all important environment values are written to
disk and a "restore" of a previous "save" is performed.
After the "restore" the environment (which is erased by a "restore"
action) is fetched from disk and we can continue with a clean memory.
People wo are interested in the code can mail me.

>1270 dpi fonts, aside from eating disk space like chocolate chip cookies
>are cumbersome to move around networks, and consume memory on the linotronic.
>This causes most of the problems as far as I can determine. Some pages
>when processed with a dvi2ps that uses the builtin fonts on the lino for
>all but math STILL failed when there were a lot of different fonts on
>a page (8 different families or sizes). This appeared to be very inefficient
>re-encoding of the builtin fonts. 

>Lets hear from anyone please...

I talked to the Linotronic salesman about this problem and he inquired
the research lab about any memory extension possibilities.
There weren't any! However, they recognized the problem and may do
some modifications on the ROM's to support more memory in future releases.

The limited memory of the Linotronic made us decide to buy a Compugraphic
typesetter driven by an Agfa engine with Adobe ROM's. This implementation
supports 4 Mb of virtual memory; enough for our purposes.


	Jan van der Steen
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     Jan van der Steen                 jansteen@cwi.nl
     Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI)
     Kruislaan 413, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands