[cups.general] Nesting

Michael Sweet mike at easysw.com
Sun Nov 5 17:50:09 PST 2006


Stroller wrote:
> 
> On 5 Nov 2006, at 12:07, Shishko wrote:
>>
>> I wonder is there any way I could somehow simulate "nesting" 
>> functionality with plotter that does not provide it? By nesting I mean 
>> way to minimize media usage by plotting different drawings side by side.
> 
> I think this is called "n-up" printing, and is explained at 
> <http://www.cups.org/doc-1.1/sum.html#4_3_4>

No, that's something completely different.

Nesting is the process of merging multiple jobs into a single job that
is printed across the width of the roll.  Basically, if you were
printing three 12x18 photos on a 40" roll (fairly common size for
current large format printers), nesting software would print these
photos across the width of the roll rather than printing them one
after another.  High-end devices even support cutting the nested
jobs apart, so you'd end up with 3 12x18 photos plus the remaining
waste pieces on either side of the roll.

Traditionally this functionality has been provided by the printer
controller but is limited by available memory/disk in the controller.
However, it can be done in software, typically by having a nesting
queue which combines multiple jobs and then sends the combined job to
the "master" queue.

To the original poster - I'm not aware of any free software solutions,
however it should be possible to write a simple PostScript-based
nesting backend which collects pages and creates jobs with the pages
drawn across the width of the page.  The tricky part is controlling
when the nesting queue decides to print a partial row - timeouts are
sometimes OK (especially if the timeout doesn't start until pending
rows have finished printing), but you might want a manual release
mechanism depending on your work flow.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software        http://www.easysw.com




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