I have been meaning to write an article one of these days on graphics programs. Today is not the
day. Today I want to talk about what to do once you have generated some sort of graphic on
your computer. And that means that somehow, you have to get that picture you have just put
together into a format where somebody else can enjoy / use / pirate / or in some way view your
work of art.
My first experience with this problem was right after I got out of school and had my first paying
job (Not with World Wide Widgets, but with the Wool and Mohair Division of the Department
of Agriculture). This being the gvmnt, they had all kinds of cutting edge stuff available. My job
was to run their chemical stockroom (that is about what a Masters in Chemistry got you in those
days). I somehow managed to spend most of my tenure in their computer lab, where they had a
fully equipped IBM 1800 process control computer, and it had a Calcomp Plotter.
You don't see plotters much these days anymore, since a color inkjet printer can pretty much do
everything that a small plotter can do, and gobs faster and cheaper. But in 1968 plotters were hot
stuff, and Calcomp was the leading name of that genre.
I had a college friend who was spending a year or so in Nam at the time. And I started using this
IBM 1800 computer as a word processor. Keep in mind that this is about 5 years before word
processors were ever heard of in office environments. After sending him a bunch of letters using
the computer's printer, I decided to send a letter using the plotter. The letters could be in color,
and it could have a semblance of fonts. And, you could play some games with the format. And
you could even include a simple graphic if you were willing to devote a lot of effort. The paper
on this thing was a continuous coil 11 inches high, and infinitely long.
Anyway, I decided to write this plotter letter with the lines in the form of a spiral, starting at the
center of the page and spiraling outwards. And each of the letters in this long spiral line would
be randomly rotated. I thought it was pretty cute. However if you have had people shooting at
you for several months your humor is not really very sharp, and my friend never did really
appreciate this letter very much.
For a lot of years, plotters were about the only thing that you could use to display graphics, until
the PC came along. In that timeframe, printers started becoming available with a sort of plot
mode. We had a Data Products printer on our minicomputers during the late 70's that would do
quite an acceptable job in producing line charts, with even some annotation. When the Epsom
printers that were so popular with PCS started producing single pixel printing capabilities so that
your Lotus 123 charts could be printed out, that seemed to open the doors to what is now a
completely graphical environment. Nobody would dream of producing a printer today that did
not have some sort of graphic capabilities.
To produce the best graphics, first you need some sort of graphic software. Today everybody
with a personal computer running Windows of any sort automatically gets at least the standard
Windows Drawing program (In W95 it is called MS Paint). For a few, or sometimes a lot, of
bucks, you can get far more sophisticated graphics programs, both bitmap like Paint, or the better
Vector mode drawing programs, like Corel Draw.
Any of these programs can print to just about any output device capable of pixel addressing. I
happen to use a LaserJet black and white printer for most of my work, since I am mostly
documenting programming proposals or programs, and B&W works just fine for line drawings.
My laserjet 4MP is capable of 600 X 600 pixel resolution, and the memory of the laserjet allows
you to "draw" the graphic inside the printer before you ever start the paper rolling. So what this
means is the printer itself rasterizes the output, rather than having your graphics software have to
do that job.
Color is available, and cheaply. We have had a color inkjet printer in our office for some time
now (about $300), but it does not get much use, since we do not have access to a cheap color
copier, so anything printed on it that will be later duplicated is most likely going to go out as a
B&W image, even if the original image was bright snazzy colors.
At any rate, all these things generate 8.5 X 11 or maybe 11 X 17 sheet fed pages. For a serious
degree of cool WOW! stuff, what is fun is to have one of your graphics sent to a place that can
produce E size full color posters of your graphics. We did this for a trade show some years ago.
We took a drawing that was included in our standard user documentation, and had it blown up to
24 X 36 inches, poster size, in full color. That graphic became the backdrop for our little exhibit
booth, and grabbed a lot of attention.
And these things to not cost much. There are several advertisers in ComputorLink magazine that
will generate such an output for you, at only about forty bucks a pop (and up). I visited one of
these companies to see just how all this is done.
Steve, the owner, showed me through his location. It appears that he has twenty or so people
beavering away, using about that many different kinds if copiers, blueprint machines,
workstations, paper handlers and manglers of all sorts, and of course, the ink jet printers, plotters,
and electrostatic devices that a professional outfit would have. Probably what surprised me the
most was how real busy the place was. I would not have thought that there would be such a
demand for producing high grade professional output in this town, and Steve's was only one of
several different companies doing this sort of thing.
I had assumed that a professional printer, especially a color one, would be some high tech form
of a laser jet, or a 4 part dye imaging device. And such do exists, except that they are
electrostatic printers, and they cost real well into five figures. Steve is in the process of tossing
all that stuff out as it reaches the end of its lifetime. Serious ink jet printers, not the kind you
would go down to your local ComputorLink advertizer to buy, but industrial strength
professional grade inkjet printers, are a fraction the price of an electrostatic printer, maybe
somewhat slower, but they give at least the same quality of output.
I took a bunch of floppies with drawings in different formats (postscript, tiff, pcx) to test this all
out, but I found that he has at least two Novell networks there, with both Macs and PC
workstations connected to it, and on these workstations he has literally all the latest and greatest
versions of all the major drawing and graphics arts programs that you could imagine. The
program I use is Corel 5, and he has Corel 7. He has all the Adobe products, the Micrographics,
the Microsoft, and so on. The screen was full of icons of probably $20k worth of graphics
software programs.
So all you have to do is to product your graphic (or text based copy) in whatever your favorite
program is, and chances are very good he will have that program in his shop. Fonts could be a
problem, so if you are using an off the wall font, you would have to bring that in too.
All of his printers are connected to the network, so any printer (including, strangely, some of his
copiers, which will act as printers) can be the target of any of these programs, once he has the
proper driver for it.
To produce his largest graphics, he has an ink jet printer that is 36 inches wide, and can produce
infinitely long sheets. (The pen reservoir can be filled While the printer is printing, a real neat
touch for some huge drawing that could drain the pens in one drawing.) His longest output so
far was 18 feet, for use as a backdrop by one of the local television stations.
There are over ten different kinds of paper that you can use, from bond to canvas of all things.
The printing charge is by the Square Foot(!), and is a function of the paper type, so figure $40-$75 for a standard poster on not too weird paper.
They have not been asked to do much custom stuff. That is, they do not expect you to bring in a
beginning graphic and ask them to clean it up or enhance it. They are not in the drawing
business, but the printing business. A poster size print takes about a half hour of chugging away.
Keep in mind that these things are in full color, and can be very impressive, if your original
graphic was at all impressive.
They can also scan photos, and blow them up to poster size and print them out for you. If you do
not have a vector based graphic, but use a bitmap graphic program, that is OK, because they have
software that will dither the pixels for you. Consider if you used MS Paint to generate a graphic,
as a pcx (bitmapped) drawing. If now you blow this 72dpi 4X5 inch drawing up to 36 X 48, each
pixel of the original drawing would normally look like a golfball. Except that this software can
smooth all this stuff over and make even the seriously enlarged version of your graphic look
quite presentable.
So, if you are looking for that neat birthday gift, that snazzy advertizement, or just want to plaster
your bathroom walls with your artistic talent, consider having it blown up to poster size.
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Afterwords
I was not allowed in the article to use the name of the company that I interviewed, because there are several such companies advertizing in the magazine, and the editor did not want any of them to feel slighted, and I did not have time to interview every one of them. It is too bad. These guys were real helpful to me and I wish I could give them some credit. In the published article, even the guy's name, Steve, got purged.