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Plotters

    Date: Mon, 3 Dec 90 20:12-0000
    From: Guy@AVON.sltd.dialnet.symbolics.com (Guy Footring)

    Does anyone have any experience of driving plotters from a Symbolics?
    A while back I saw that there is some plotter code in the SLUG library - can anyone send me some
    details - e.g. what plotter(s), what is the level of interface support?

I wrote a HPGL plotter stream for a reasonable subset of the graphics:
primitives a few months ago. Simply bind the stream to this and all your
graphics:  based output works. It even tries to duplicate the stipple
patterns.

It will drive the current HP line of plotters. They are hooked up via
the serial port on the back of a machine or console. You can of course
easily configure it to be a service accessible to other machines.

Text is very slow, but thats life with a pen plotter.

    I'm principally interested in:

    1) which plotters are known to have been successfully hooked up to a Symbolics?
    2) how much do they cost?

For HP plotters roughly $500-$1500 for A4, $15k-$20k for big ones.
My prices maybe a little dated.

    3) how hard it was

    4) how big was the output it supported (continuous roll, A0, A1, ...?)

Depends how much money you have.

    5) how hard would it be to link a plotter in to mechanisms such as format-graph-from-root?

The driver I wrote supports that.

    Is there such a thing as a postscript-driven plotter?

Yes, but they are raster devices, essentially printers that support
bigger paper (I think these get expensive). There are also reasonably
priced postscript printers that support color (as low as $6k).

    I've no experience of using plotters or writing the relevant interface code for them, though I have written
    interfaces for numerous other devices.  One of the purposes of attaching a plotter would be to produce hardcopy
    of massive graphs produced by format-graph-from-root, so any leads on how hard this is likely to be would be much
    appreciated.

    Thanks in advance for any information

    Guy Footring.

I believe Symbolics owns this code. If this sounds like something that
you could use either I or yourself could see if the Symbolics Consulting
Group will make it available to you.

If you need more info mail me directly.


David Tan.

Consultant