Photocopying feature of 6.1.0

[cf744@xxxxxx (Serge Mister)]

Below is the result of your feedback form.  It was submitted by
Serge Mister (cf744@ncf.ca) on Saturday, March 31, 2001 at 22:47:39
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message: Hello,

I had one question about the copying feature added to version 6.1.0.
If I understand the code correctly, the feature runs the print filter
once, saving the output to file, then sends the file multiple times to
get the multiple copies.  This saves software rendering time (for
example, with ghostscript).

With laser printers, however, I believe there is a more effective
solution.  I suspect it also works well with ink jets although the
additional time savings may not be as great.

With apsfilter 6.0 I was using the line

      copies=[0-9]|copies=[0-9][0-9])    GS_FEATURES="$GS_FEATURES -dNumCopies=${option#copies=}" ;;

to implement a copies class option.

This causes Ghostscript to generate the multiple copies.  Ghostscript
then uses printer language features to tell the printer to print
multiple copies.  For postscript and PCL (at least) that means that
the printer data for a page is only sent once to the printer, then the
printer prints it multiple times.  For a laser printer, this causes a
dramatic improvement because the page is only rendered once on the
drum, and the time to transmit a page of data to the printer only
occurs once.  Ghostscript still only does the rendering once, and I
think it works fine with the manual duplexing code as well.

Would it be worth going this route?  Let me know if you have any
questions or comments,

Serge


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