From:	MERC::"uunet!CRVAX.SRI.COM!RELAY-INFO-VAX" 25-NOV-1992 18:43:02.90
To:	BCSAIC!"INFO-VAX@sri.com"
CC:	M.D.Clay@CRVAX.SRI.COM
Subj:	Re: Need faster PrintScreen for DECwindows Motif V1.1 - SUMMARY

In a prior post, I wrote:

>Has anyone else noticed that PostScript PrintScreen operations take about eight
>times longer under DECwindows Motif than they used to under the DECwindows
>software?

>I'm still trying to convince DEC to give us something at least as fast as the
>old DECwindows screen print.  In the meantime, does anyone out there have a
>fast screen print utility for DECwindows Motif V1.0A or higher?

Well, I've got some good news!  DEC now has a patch available for this problem.
It is CSCPAT_1067 V1.0 "Printscreen problems in DECwindows Motif V1.1."  It 
fixes a few other problems, but the one important to us was:

           The PostScript generated when making a Black and White capture
           on a Color or Grayscale system was very large.  This adversely
           affected printing performance.

You need to have DECwindows Motif V1.1 and VMS V5.4 through V5.5-2 in order to 
install the patch.

Gray Scale PostScript captures are still just large, but that is "expected
behavior".  I must admit that blue and green text is much more legible using
the new DECW$PRINTSCREEN utility, so we at least get something in return for
all those disk blocks.

We submitted the problem 20-OCT-1992 and had a pre-release patch in our
DSN$COPY_DIRECTORY on 16-NOV-1992.  The quick turnaround is very much 
appreciated...

I would also like to thank the following for their workaround contributions:

   Herman (no last name, no e-mail address) who knew of a PD utility:

      There is a public domain utility xgrabsc, which does a print screen with
      many options, such as output style, bits per pixel, and lots more. It is
      a pure low-level X11 program and works with DECwindows (apart from a few
      options). This may be of use to you, although I must admit that I had to
      make quite a few changes to make it work in reasonable time on a VAX. It
      was probably written on a RISC machine where there were enough CPU cycles
      to spill ;-)

   Jean-Pierre Farine (farine@decus.ch) who suggested using SIXEL output:

      We found that using sixel as output format (instead of postscript) is 
      much faster and of good quality under Motif.

   J.A.B. (who wishes to remain anonymous) for the following "ugly kludge":

      What I ended up doing was directing the [SIXEL] dump to a disk file.
      The first few characters of this file are:  DCS 9 q  [DCS == <ESC> P]
      Changing the "9" to a "9;;4" or "9;;5" makes things fit!

Sorry if I missed anyone to whom credit is due.  I hope someone out there
will find this information useful.

	Michael Clay
	Boeing Computer Services
	Internet: claym@bcsaic.boeing.com
	Mom Bell: (206)952-0504 from 08:30 to 17:00 PST