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December 1994
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1994.12.19 18:33 "Re: TIFF Printing and Storage Optimization", by Sam Leffler
To: BRADY_CLARK_D@Lilly.com
Subject: Re: TIFF Printing and Storage Optimization
Cc: tiff@sgi.sgi.com, BRADY_CLARK_D@Lilly.com
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 1994 08:04:16 +0100
From: Fredrik Lundh <Fredrik_Lundh@IVAB.SE>
A few short answers:
> 1) How is the fastest way to print TIFF to post script? I'm looking
> for the best procedure that produces the easiest to interpret
> PS...it doesn't have to exist in a product.
Make sure you have a Postscript Level 2 printer, compress the image
using CCITT Group 4, and finally send it to the printer using tiff2ps.
If that isn't fast enough, get a printer with a faster CPU or go for
an accelerator board.
I'm probably out of touch, but I do not believe that PSL2 is commonly
available on printers. If this person is building something for a
closed environment then they can always just control the printing
environment and optimize the entire environment. As an example, SGI
sells a printer+software that's hooked to the host via SCSI and the
RIP is done on the host. In this case there's not a whole lot of reason
to optimize the submitted PS 'cuz it's all done on the host.
> 3) Are XIP Print boards a good printing solution? Any other vendor
> boards? I also know that some QMS & XEROX printers can accept TIFFs
> directly.
*All* level 2 printers accept CCITT/LZW/JPEG compressed data directly;
check the sources for tiff2ps for ideas on how to utilize this when
printing TIFF files. Packbits and other runlength encoding schemes
are fairly simple to implement on level 1 printers as well.
Once again I may be out of touch, but I'm not sure that if a vendor
suports PSL2 that it also supports all the filters or all the options
to the filters. Most folks do support the CCITT filters, but certainly
not JPEG (unless they get their PS implementation from Adobe). My
experience is that implementing any decoder logic in PostScript in the
printer is a loss (granted I last tried it back when my printer was an
Apple LaserWriter).
> 4) Ever seen any printing solutions that only send the black part of
> images to the printer?
Most compression methods compress black *and* white regions before
sending them to the printer.
It was never stated what type of images were to be printed. If only
bilevel images are to be printed then my fax2ps program may do the
job. It generates a highly-encoded PostScript that was designed for
printers connected to a host with a low-speed serial line. The only
issue with fax2ps is that it requires the printer PostScript do a good
job of coordinate precision; if the interpreter is at all inaccurate
then the resulting image will not look as good as sending the complete
raster.
> 6) Is it possible to remove margins from an image and then save the
> image with the original image size and then have a TIFF compliant
> reader reconstruct the orginal image?
Nope. But if you use compression, this is not much of a problem.
Depends on whether the TIFF reader understands the XPosition and
YPosition tags (probably not).
Sam