Zipper is an alias for the 4050 printer located in the pod 3 maze. A 4050 is a duplex printer (prints two-sided pages) that prints at 50 pages a minute. The xerographic print quality is excellent, producing the best laser printer output at PARC. A 4050 comes as two boxes, a printer based on the 1090 copier and a control system (ESS) based on an LSI-11 microprocessor. The 4050 is part of the 9700 family of data center printers, and as such, it inherits a number of "design features" that assume a knowledgeable operator. While adding paper and fixing paper jams on the printer are based on the 1090 copier, determine the status of the ESS is a tricky business and should be left to key operators.

The 4050 is registered as [Warning Appearance Errors:Parc:Xerox] and supports only the Interpress 3.0 Commercial Set functionality (text at 90 degree rotations, raster images and simple rectangles -- no curves, no fancy fonts).

If you choose to use the 4050 from Cedar, you should use the command InterpressToCompressedIP to create a page bitmap from your Interpress master (see InterpressConvertersDoc.tioga) and then send the commpressed Interpress master to Zipper.

If you choose to use the 4050 from ViewPoint or XDE, you should use the print service Perfector instead. Perfector is described below.

[Perfector:Parc:Xerox] is an alternate route to the 4050 at PARC. It is a print service running on a Dandelion server that accepts Interpress masters (Interpress 2.1 reference level subset, mainly supporting ViewPoint features) and simplifies them for forwarding to Zipper. All ViewPoint and XDE users will probably prefer to use Perfector to access the 4050 printer.

PARC has installed several Interpress 3.0 Professional Graphics Set print servers based on the Cedar Imager and Interpress implementations. These printers will print any Interpress master generated by Cedar, ViewPoint, XDE or Interpress ToolKit applications (subject to resource limitations on the Dandelion processor, mainly virtual memory limits). Here is a list of printers near CSL.

804x's are the most prevalent Interpress printers around PARC. You can find them listed under NS PRINTERS in [Indigo]<Registrar>ParcPhoneList.txt; here are a few near CSL:

Well, there's a lot more about creating Interpress masters than I can hope to cover here, but here's a simple example. For more information look at TiogaImagerDoc.tioga, or contact the folks in the Imaging Group. (Caution: InterpressToCompressedIP takes a while even on a Dorado and consumes substantial disk space.)

Slides are a little unique, as you want to start with the specialized form in order to have available to you some of the characters which are only available on the Interpress printers (press has a smaller character set).

A quick synopsis: SendIPMaster transmits an Interpress master to a print service (a piece of software). In actuality, nothing checks to see if the contents of the file is an actual master, so this is actually a slight deception. Furthermore, SendIPMaster knows nothing about Interpress, nothing about the imaging software on the print service side, nor what the intended appearance of the "file" actually is. The job of SendIPMaster is simply to deliver (reliably) the contents of the file in question to the printer. In order to understand what the printer is going to do with this master, you need to look at the print service documentation. It would be wonderful if everything simply printing Interpress 3.0!

A quick synopsis: FaxIPMaster transmits an Interpress master to a print service (a piece of software) identically to the way SendIPMaster does, but the "message" field of the protocol is filled in with an encoding of the destination phone number of the remote Fax machine, so when the document is "printed" it is actually sent over telephone lines to a fax machine somewhere out there in the *real* world.

A quick synopsis: GetPrintStatus queries the print service to determine the present state. There are 4 interesting aspects: spooler, formatter, printer, and media. Spooler status explains the current state of the ability of ther print service to accept print requests, formatter status explains the current state of the Interpress master decomposition software, printer status explains the current state of the marking engine, and media status explains the currently available materials upon which masters can be rendered.

A quick synopsis: GetPrintProperties queries the print service to determine the present abilites of the printer. There are 3 interesting properties: media, staple, and twoSided. Media properties describe the currently available materials upon which masters can be rendered, staple & twoSided describe the availablity of the stapling and duplex printing services.

A quick synopsis: XNSPrintRequestWatcher provides the ability to create/open a manipulative interface for dealing with active print requests (documents previously transmitted to print services). More below...

A quick synopsis: Currently, there are some bugs, and the functionality should be inhanced, but poking on the button which corresponds to a print request will query the service and display the print requests' current state. Buttons currently include <service, request id, filename>; the interesting part of a request id is the 4th word 4 which seems to be a sequentially assigned value on Services 10.0 printers. Display is via a typescript which gets logged on the file ///Temp/XNSPrintRequestWatcher.TypeScript