Subject: Re: OPI Server ready
From: Alex Alegado (alex@alegado.com)
Date: Thu Feb 08 2001 - 23:47:39 EST
OPI is **THE** Holy Grail the print industry is looking for. The trade mags
mention Linux as a curiosity and of the few sites that use Linux, the stumbling
block to full deployment is the lack of a good OPI solution. Unless the site was
using it solely for file- and non-OPI print services, there's always the OPI
caveat mentioned in the articles. SIGH.
The leading solutions are either NT-based (ScenicSoft's "Color Central" or
IPTech's "CanOPI") or commercial Unix-based (Xinet's "FullPress" or Helios'
"EtherShare").
In principle, all it needs to be is a filter for a printer queue. The filter
would grep the PostScript stream and every time it sees an OPI "Comment" it
grabs the filename listed in the comment and substitutes the file for the
comment. Naturally, all kinds of intelligence needs to be built in to the filter
for validating the OPI comment and dealing with the potential for super-hairy
filenames which are, unfortunately, common on Macintosh volumes.
CanOPI from the list above does the file substitution on the fly while most of
the others (I'm not sure about FullPress) write a new (larger) file as the input
job is processed. CanOPI's method is slick since it minimizes diskspace
requirements on the OPI server and the read/write penalty.
On 2/6/01 at 2:06 AM, Bruce A. Burdick, Jr. <bucky@interaccess.com> wrote some
or all of the following...
> If I recall correctly, in the publishing industry an OPI server is one that
> swaps high resolution images for low resolution images (often called "FPO"s
> for "For Placement Only"). I guess the connection to netatalk is that Macs
> have been big in publishing and a cheap Linux box with netatalk and a good
> open source OPI server would make for an interesting bargain. I don't
> remember what OPI stands for (Open Press Interface?).
>
> -B...
>
> > From: Volker Birk <vb@kanguruh.ebios.de>
> > Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 08:14:21 +0100
> > To: "Frank Morton" <fmorton@base2inc.com>
> > Cc: "Volker Birk" <vb@kanguruh.ebios.de>, <netatalk-admins@umich.edu>
> > Subject: Re: OPI Server ready
> > Resent-From: netatalk-admins@umich.edu
> > Resent-Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 02:19:07 -0500 (EST)
> >
> > On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 01:43:32PM -0500, Frank Morton wrote:
> >> Good! Does it include utilities to make fpo images?
> >
> > What are fpo images?
> >
> > VB.
> > --
> > *** ebios Informationssysteme, Germany *** vb@kangu:~ $ cd /pub/
> > *** Gut-Betha-Platz 1, 88339 Bad Waldsee *** vb@kangu:/pub $ more beer
> > *** Phone +49-7524-93421 Fax +49-7524-93423 *** Aaahhhh! That was good!
> > *** mailto:vb@ebios.de *** vb@kangu:/pub $ _
> >
--
==========================================================================
Alex Alegado, alex@alegado.com, 626.524.0624 Cel w/VMail
Prepress Supervisor, California Plasticard
213.742.9852 Voice, 213.742.0086 FAX, http://www.cpicardgroup.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
the.ThoughtShop.net -- Low-cost web-hosting and design...
Apache-based Miva, CGI, PHP, MySQL support
info@thoughtshop.net, http://the.ThoughtShop.net
==========================================================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sun Oct 14 2001 - 03:04:32 EDT