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Notes on Sending Graphics to Imagen Laser Printers

When using pic and troff to send graphical output to the Imagen laser printers, the printer will sometimes fail to print the graphics properly. This happens because the Imagen laser printers try to format the page they are printing while the page is being printed. Normally this works out just fine and results in increased throughput from the printer. However, when the printer has to draw graphics containing many lines the formatter sometimes can't keep up with the printing of the page and your graphical output comes out split up across the page. But don't panic, there is a solution.

You can force the printer to format each entire page before printing begins. This will slow down the printer, but your graphics will come out in one piece. To do this you first need to convert the output from troff into commands for the Imagen laser printer you are using. This conversion can be accomplished by using the ns command to run the appropriate conversion program on the machine the printer is connected to. Here is a list showing which machine each printer is connected to and which conversion program is used with each printer:

Printer         Machine         Conversion Program

ei              ee              di300 -t
ei3             ed              di300 -t
gi              gb              di300 -t
gi2             gb              di300 -t
ci              cb              di240 -t
mi              ma              di300 -t
msi             ed              di300 -t
msi2            eg              di300 -t
pi2             pc              di300 -t
ti              ma              di300 -t

Once the conversion is done the header ``@document(prerasterization on)'', which tells the printer to format each page before printing it, needs to be prepended to the converted file and then sent to the printer using the ``-l'' option of lpr. For example, if you normally print your document on the ``ei3'' Imagen laser printer using the command:

   $ mmt.  -Ti300  -p textfile | lpr  -Pei3  -n

but the graphics come out split up across the page, then using the command:

   $ mmt. -Ti300 -p textfile | ns ed -S di300 -t |
       (echo -n '@document(prerasterization on)'; cat  -) |
       lpr  -Pei3  -l

would cause the graphics to be printed properly on the ``ei3'' Imagen laser printer. Be sure to change the ns command in the above example to go to the appropriate machine and use the correct conversion program for your printer.

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