AWGS, AW Classic, PCL, text, serial, parallel (Re: parallel card)

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Joe Kohn <joko@GotSpam?crl.com> wrote:

> >The difference between serial and parallel really showed up here,
> >about 4 times a speed difference,
>
>I'm almost hesitant to say anything more, because part of me is just darn
>curious to see how far people are willing to go in order to try to back up
>a claim that cannot be verified, proven, replicated or explained.
>
>The fact of the matter is that data is sent out of a parallel port much,
>much, much faster than it is sent out of a serial port. Typical parallel
>transfer speeds approach 100k/sec; the IIGS serial port is 19.2k/sec. Even
>when using the Harmonie high speed Serial port driver, the top transfer rate
>is 57.6k/sec.
>
>If you want to believe that using the IIGS serial port is as fast as using
>a parallel port, go ahead, be my guest. It's not correct, but hey, this is
>usenet.

Let's clear this up once and for all.

Using AWGS with Harmonie and printing a page is 4x faster
with a parallel card than a serial port.  Since the difference
amounts to minutes, this is significant. That's your point, right?

Why is this so?  Because IIGS programs print in graphics
mode and the image is RENDERED which means that a
stream of PIXEL information is sent to the printer.  HP
printers use PCL to organize the rendered image.

Bev said that AppleWorks CLASSIC (NOT AppleWorks GS)
prints about the same speed on serial as on parallel.  Why
does it seem this way?  Because AW Classic is a TEXT
based program.  Text based programs do NOT send pixel
information through the interface.  They send whole
characters.  By the way, when using text based programs,
PCL is not used in HP printers.  Not graphical PCL at
least.  Merely some printer control codes for formatting
are used.

What's the difference in information density between a
rendered page consisting of pixels and a text page with
character info?  A page at 300 dpi is 8.5 x 11 inches.
That's 8.5x300x11x300!  That's a lot of pixels!  Compare
this to a page of text characters.  How many characters
in a page?  About 1000 maybe?  BIG difference.

Thus, while an AWGS may take minutes to zap across
a serial link, an AW Classic page takes 1 second.

Parallel is STILL faster than serial, but what is 4x faster
than a 1 second serial zap?  1/4 sec?

Do humans normally notice 1 sec vs. 1/4 sec difference?

No.

That explains why Bev said serial vs. parallel does not
make a difference in AW Classic.

As for explaining and verifying, I printed a page from
ProTERM to prove my point earlier in the thread.

One more thing: you said that your printer took 33 sec
to print an AW Classic page?  But that's how fast your
PRINTER is.  How long did AW Classic take to
TRANSFER the document to your printer's BUFFER?
This is how long it took for AW Classic to relinquish
control back to you (I used AW Classic with a dot
matrix printer with not much of a buffer so I know that
without the buffer, AW Classic does not relinquish
control)?  Within one second, right?

Case closed.