NeWSprint questions

[Joe Smith]

In article <887 at brchh104.bnr.ca> bin at primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) writes:

>1) The NeWSprint bundle comes with the software, a SPARCprinter and an
>   interface card.  The card goes in an Sbus slot and provides a parallel
>   interface for the printer.  But how many printers can go on a SPARCstation
>   (e.g., a SS 2).  One per available slot?

The glossy from Sun says that the SBus Printer Card has "Dual DMA channel
architecture" on a single SBus slot.  It has 2 printer ports; one is a
bidirectional parallel port for Centronics-compatible printers and
digitizers, the other is a dedicated port for the SPARCprinter laser
printer.  This is a "high speed serial/video" interface.

>2) Can the NeWSprint software be used to produce raster images for
>   printers that are *not* physically connected to the SS?

Quoting from the "NeWSprint White Paper" that came from Sun:

|When a job is spooled to the imaging software by lpd, a shell script
|called npcomm establishes and maintains a connection between the X11/NeWS
|server, which acts as the PostScript interpreter, and the printer handler.
|...  The server creates a representation of each page of the file in one
|of several shared memory buffers.  The handler begins looking at the same
|pages in memory and sends the page description information to the device
|driver that creates the desired picture on the printed page.

It looks like the handler and the server have to be on the same machine.
It's not clear whether the device driver has to be /dev/something on the
local machine, or can be a socket to another machine.

Joe Smith (408)922-6220 | SMTP: jms at tardis.tymnet.com or jms at gemini.tymnet.com
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