1994.12.19 03:05 "TIFF Printing and Storage Optimization", by Clark Brady

1994.12.19 18:33 "Re: TIFF Printing and Storage Optimization", by Sam Leffler

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.

  1. 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).

  1. 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.

  1. 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