RasterPlus/PS

By Donald Jenner

PostScript is, however painful, a standard.  One of the interesting problems
has been using PostScript with film recorders.  Generally, film recorders are
not "native" PostScript devices; this means a translator is needed somewhere
in between the application generating the PostScript output and the camera.
The natural place to do this is on the host computer, and that approach is
being implemented by a number of software vendors.  The newest in the group
is Graphx, with its RasterPlus/PS.

RasterPlus/PS came highly recommended by Polaroid Corp., whose Digital Palette
CI-5000 film recorder is a particular favorite here, by virtue of its modest
footprint and excellent price/performance characteristics (the price just dropped,
while the box now has more internal buffering, meaning faster processing --
and Polaroid sells this as a "kit" with both print and 35mm slide film backs,
and the machines for processing and mounting instant slides).  It also makes 
nice pictures....  We drove the film recorder from our high-end 486/66mHz
machine; the large memory area on this machine means host processing can be
done entirely in RAM -- another speed-up factor.  The test image was done
in Corel Draw 4.0.

Installing RasterPlus/PS was fairly simple.  This is a DOS program with its
own memory management scheme, but Graphx has seen the light, and provides a
Windows driver outputting a suitable PostScript file and .PIF files which
allow RasterPlus/PS itself to run in a DOS virtual machine session -- the 
program requires a 386 or later processor.  Instructions were fairly clear,
including the make-it-work-with-Windows sections.

RasterPlus/PS sports a Lotus 123 style menu; among other things, it lets
you check film recorder setup, and preview images.

The Windows driver created a clean, accurate PostScript file from our test image.
However, we were puzzled by the server-mode operation of RasterPlus/PS;
it loaded, but it is not clear that it operated well from within its 
virtual machine.  To get a timed test, it was necessary to exit Windows
and revert to the standard DOS interactive mode of the program.  This
had the added advantage of making substantially more memory available for
RasterPlus/PS.  After selecting the image to process, the program took over.

Processing time was 13.5 minutes to produce a standard 3.5"x4.25" print
from a file consisting of two blended polygons, a line drawing and some
text.  By comparison, standard SuperPrint output to the film recorder,
using the same image, took about one and a half minutes.  In short, Raster-
Plus/PS did a good job, but comes up against the usual PostScript problem
-- speed.

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Contact:
Graphx, Inc.  400 W. Cummings Park, Woburn, MA 01801