Phoenix Technologies Ltd has won itself such a reputation for skill and excellence with its ROM BIOSes for IBM Personal clonemakers that the Norwood, Massachusetts company has to be taken seriously for whatever else it does. And the latest offering from Phoenix is an Adobe Systems PostScript-compatible interpreter which the company will license to manufacturers […]
Phoenix Technologies Ltd has won itself such a reputation for skill and excellence with its ROM BIOSes for IBM Personal clonemakers that the Norwood, Massachusetts company has to be taken seriously for whatever else it does. And the latest offering from Phoenix is an Adobe Systems PostScript-compatible interpreter which the company will license to manufacturers wanting to build laser printers and other devices. At the Seybold conference, Phoenix got together with Bell & Howell Inc in Torrance, California and Bitstream Inc of Cambridge, Massachusetts to announce that Bell & Howell’s Quintar division is to build a high-speed controller card built around the Texas Instruments TMS 34010 graphics signal processor, using the Phoenix interpreter and Bitstream’s fonts. Quintar says that the controller will support print engine speeds of up to 40 pages per minute – and according to Microbytes, there were hints that the controller will not be confined to driving laser printers, but will find its way into display controllers as well, and will also be used to drive scanners. The controller board is due in the fourth quarter. Meantime the Phoenix language implementati on is based upon a proprietary technology that the company calls Preprocessed Outlining, claimed to provide higher performance than PostScript. The company describes it as a high-speed format with the same Adobe aesthetics but providing output at bit-mapped speeds. It is not pixel-for-pixel the same as PostScript, but only light-table compatible, and provides congruent output with the Apple LaserWriter, but that does mean a user can replace a printer using the Adobe product with one that uses the Phoenix. It claims that speed of firmware-based font and image scaling and rotation is significantly greater, and that throughput is eight to 12 times faster than with current Apple Las- erWriters – up to 24 pages per minute. It also looks for the technology to handle Japanese Kanji fonts and document post-processing tasks that currently need too much memory. It foresees laser printers that combine PostScript, Hewlett- Packard PCL, Diablo 630, and other emulations. The Phoenix PostScript is available now to OEM customers.
