Re: GSAS Postscript to X-Y Coordinate data converter

Brian H. Toby ( (no email) )
Tue, 5 Aug 1997 15:21:14 -0400

On Aug 4, 5:34pm, Lachlan Cranswick wrote:
> >
> >I pay respect to Sung's and Tadashi's work, but wouldn't it be easier to
> >buy a PostScript extension for your printer then (if you would have to buy
> >the Graphics Software anyways) ?
>
> Can you get a Postscript attachment for a Canon BJ10e injet printer
> and cost effective like minder printers? I think not! :-)

I am pretty sure that ghostscript is available for Windows for free -- this
does a nice job of translating postscript for use with cheap printers. I use it
with LINUX and a very old Deskjet and the output is nearly laser quality.

>
> Apologies for being so DOS and MS-Windows centered but that seems to
> be where the effort is going now days?
>

You may be right on the commercial end, but for folks with small wallets, I
would like to put in a good word for LINUX. It runs well on PC hardware. Costs
nothing. There are lots of nifty free utilities and compiliers that cost big
bucks on other platforms. For the cost of a few hundred megabytes of diskspace
and perhaps a $50 CDROM (which you can legally share with all your friends),
you can have most of the power of a professional workstation on a PC, with
X-windows, etc. My personal benchmark showed that GSAS runs in equal speeds on
an R4400 Silicon Graphics and a 166mHz pentium running LINUX.

All the software that I write in the future will run on LINUX and the SGI. I
will try to stay compatible with Win95, but will leave debugging that to
others.

-- ***********************************************************************Brian H. Toby                      Center for Neutron Research E151/235Brian.Toby@NIST.gov        National Institute of Standards & Technologyvoice: 301-975-4297  FAX: 301-921-9847           Gaithersburg, MD 20899***********************************************************************