Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

*NIX Ripping Solutions For Plotters

Posted by timothy on from the let-one-rip dept.

haogemenr writes: "I work in an all Apple architecture firm, but we have a Linux box that primarily functions as a DSL router. The options for large format plotter drivers in the Macintosh world are few and relatively expensive. PostScript output devices are a great, but expensive solution and HP doesn't provide any Mac-friendly drivers for non-PostScript plotters. What are the *nix solutions? You can write PostScript from CAD application using a generic PostScript driver, but converting PostScript to an RTL file or HPGL2 file is necessary for lots of older plotters. I've heard of an application named makertl, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere. What do Unix folks use for large format image processing?"

3 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Possible solutions... by Ster · · Score: 2, Insightful

    CUPS is part of Jaguar (Mac OS X v. 10.2), which has gone GM and will be released on August 24. They (correctly) decided the old print system in X, well, sucks and needs a total re-write.

    So yeah, it'll happen in 20 days. :-)

    -Ster

  2. Re:Possible solutions... by Thauma · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Correct, CUPS is supposed to be in Jaguar, however it does not allow for Mac applications to print using it. They have not created any kind of PrintCenter/CUPS bridge that will take MacOS Quartz based PDF print output and send it to a CUPS printer.

  3. Re:Ghostscript by dougmc · · Score: 3, Insightful
    That would be nasty.

    Ghostscript (gs) basically converts postscript to a bitmap, then uses whatever drivers it has to convert that to the needed format.

    This works reasonably well for pictures and stuff, but for a plotter this would be iffy at best. When you actually printed it out, rather than drawing the lines as designed, the pen would trace a line across the page, go down a tiny bit, trace another line, go down a tiny bit, trace another line, etc. As needed, the pen would be raised and dropped, probably drawing lots of dots. Eventually, it would probably draw the picture ok, but it could take hours, and would wear out your plotter.

    This all assumes that what I know about plotters hasn't become totally obsolete. When I worked with plotters like 15 years ago, that's how they worked. Maybe they're fancier now.

    To put this in video game terms -- think a Vectrex vs an Atari 2600. The Vectrex draws lines, and they look perfect (in arcade terms, think the original Star Wars game, think Asteroids, Star Castles.) The 2600 drew bitmaps -- less precise, but more flexible (think the arcade Space Invaders.)