Experimental Page Makeup of Text with Graphics on a Raster Printer

economic advantages of printing internal-use documents on a raster printer have usually been limited to purely numeric and text documents. This paper describes an experimental character-graphic art program that demonstrates the potential of the IBM 3800 f o r printing a restricted set of character-graphic art documents. A special character set is outlined, as well as an algorithm that selects those characters from the set that best approximate any straight line. This character-graphic algorithm permits line art to be included in formatted text documents. There is no manual artwork or paste-up in the document output. The artwork for this paper has been reproducedfrom material printed by the technique discussed, although the body text has been reset from the 3800 output. Publications for use within a company frequently contain text and graphics (line drawings, graphs, images). Some documents, such as maintenance manuals, typically consist of 30 percent high quality artwork. Other documents, such as procedures manuals, contain flow charts and similar simple diagrams. Line printers such as the IBM 1403 have been used to print such output by using appropriate available character sets. Similarly, the format character set of the IBM 3800 raster printer' " can be used for simple drawings. This paper describes an experimental effort aimed at the uncomplicated end of the art and document spectrum. The goal has been to study the potential of the 3800 to produce simple line art intermixed with text. Although few readers question the appeal or value of illustrations, there are several additional objectives. The artwork must be easy to define and modify. It should be visually pleasing (i.e. have adequate line quality). Finally, it is valuable to treat the text and artwork together, in order to be able to store the entire document digitally and eliminate expense and potential errors of hand collating figures into text after printing. Copying is permitted without payment of royalty provided that (1) each reproduction is done without alteration and (2) the Journal reference and IBM copyright notice are included on the first page. The title and abstract may be used without further permission in computer-based and other information-service systems. Permission to republish other excerpts should be obtained from the Editor.