Exposition review: guide to coverage: color systems, graphics, composition, output devices, writing and editing tools are among new developments. (250 vendors at Seybold Computer Publishing Conference)

Exposition reveiw: guide to coverage The fourth annual Seybold Computer Publishing Conference brought more than 250 vendors to San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center for three days of demonstrations and announcements of new capabilities. We will devote the next issue of this Report to a full review of events related to traditional publishing markets, with news of mass-market desktop products filling the October and November issues of the Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing. This summary of highlights will serve as a guide to finding in which issue to look for various types of coverage.

Where we list the relevant issues, we will abbreviate this Report as SRPS and the desktop report as SRDP, specifying Oct. or Nov. for the appropriate issue.

Output, fonts, PostScript

Secret no longer. Adobe's sudden conversion to the open-format religion was welcome news for the industry, but for a growing number of vendors, Adobe really hadn't any secrets left to hide. Printware became the latest firm to add the ability to handle encrypted Adobe fonts in its 600- and 1200-dpi machines. (RIPS has been doing it for nearly a year.) The Company demonstrated a program that performs authomatic hint-insertion and generation of fonts in Adobe's Type One format. A module to generate Apple Royal-format fonts is under development. (Oct. SRDP)

The Univeristy of California (Berkeley Computing Department) is now licensing the entire source code for a prototype PostScript interpreter program, including the routines for encrypting and decrypting Type One fonts. Before the show, it had been charging $10,000; in view of events, it may decide to cut the price. (Oct. SRDP)

PostScript horsepower. Several vendors (among them Sritech and Pipeline Associates) showed laser printer controllers based on the Advanced Micro Devices 29000 processor. This RISC chip is rated at 17.5 MIPS average and 25 MIPS in burst mode (where the data and instructions are already in the chip's internal pipeline), which should give approximately ten times the performance of the 68000 processor used in the original Apple LaserWriter. (Oct. SRDP)

However, the AMD 29000 is not the only hot chip around. Raster Image Processing Systems, whose controller is used in the Itek Graphix and Birmy Graphics imagesetters, has ported its code to the Intel i960. The i960 is available in several versions, allowing a tradeoff of price and speed; the latest version (which RIPS is not yet using) averages 44 RISC MIPS and can be goosed up to bursts of 66 MIPS. (Oct. SRDP)

Harlequin Software brought a Transputer-based controller to the show. Transputer chips, although they are 10-MIPS RISC processors in their own right, are disigned for parallel processing; with property written software, you can speed up a system merely by plugging in more chips. Unfortunately, making PostScript run in a parallel computer has turned out to be a tricky business, and Harlequin is the first firm to claim success. However, it did not show any printed output at the Conference. Look for a product announcement in mid-winter, we were told. (Oct. SRDP)

Eicon described a new …