High resolution printing — Bug #359 EPS printing: not fix

[Fredrik Stendahl]

Hi!

Thanks for all the work done to NeoJ.

I found myself today fighting to get a placed eps (a diagram for my thesis) to print on my PS-HP printer. I could not get it to work. In the BugZilla I found this entry:

Bug #359 - EPS postscript is bypassed by Neo's printing system.

and the explanation that Java uses CoreImage to print, and since CoreImage does not support EPS printing, there was not much to do about it.

Bad news. This is as good as a show stopper. I have for years used eps since it is resolution independent. I hope then that Tiger includes a CoreImage toolkit that includes eps-printing. Does anyone know?

Well there is the work around to place high resolution black&white bitmaps of my diagrams, or greyscale if necessary (use no colors in the diagrams). But, there is still the 300 dpi upper limit in NeoJ:s printing of graphics, no? In face of the eps-issue, could the implementation of high resolution printing in NeoJ be put forward somewhat?

I feel very humble when I ask this, knowing of all requests that comes flying in from everywhere, and as I for the moment do not have any resources to make contributions to the cause, other than standing by the ropes cheering the fighters along.

Best regards

Fredrik Stendahl
Agronomist/Illustrator

[OPENSTEP]

Unfortunately the upper limit in printing is really dictated by memory limits for Java and CoreGraphics. CoreGraphics is vector underneath, but it is its own vector format and doesn't support EPS directly without some type of rasterization.

The 300 dpi limit is really a tradeoff between usability and running out of memory. It takes a lot of memory to raster an entire page to memory. Patrick's also had to do a lot of workarounds to Java printing as the old 1.3.1 Apple VM doesn't actually print images at high resolutions. It has to be blocked in a particular fashion for it to work at all

ed

[Fredrik Stendahl]

Hi Ed!

Thanks for the answer.

So, in the future, with transition to new java VM, high resolution bitmap printing will be possible, but printing eps (ie sending the encapsulated postscript code of the graph/image direct to the postscript printer with no rendering i between) might still not be possible?

For any current project that needs high resolution printing I will have to look for other tools, but in time Neo/J will handle high resolution printing and? eps printing?

Will the high resolution issue be a non issue if I use the X11 OOo?

Sorry to be persistent, but this is a rather seriuos issue at least for me.

Cheers
Fredrik

[OPENSTEP]

The transition to a newer VM may help solve the printing issues, but it may introduce more problems of its own. The transition to the 1.4 VM is a non-trivial task that we haven't had time to address yet.

As to printing with X11...I don't think that there's any inherent DPI limit to it but you'll definitely find that it's a much more finicky process. It doesn't give you access to the Mac OS X print driver settings, so if there's some type of special configuration you require you may not be able to set it.

ed