Hi,
I have something I want to print which is a little off the beaten path,
so to speak. I know next to nothing about printing so I need help. I
am doing this for educational purposes to TRY to get across the concept
of large numbers to elementary school kids.
I want to put exactly one million VISIBLE, distinct dots on one 8.5 x 11
sheet of paper, plus be able to put some comments on the sides, top, or
bottom, and perhaps highlight a few of the dots with color around them
instead of white. I realize that the dots will be quite small. It
would also be nice if the page could be reproduced on a copier tho that
is not a requirement.
I have the following equipment and software: I run 32-bit Linux. I have
a variety of programs which go with my Linux (latest Slackware) such as
EMACS for (maybe?) creating repetitive printer commands and GIMP for
creating and editing images. My printer is an OKI C5300 color laser
printer which, as I understand it, can print emulating Postscript 3 and
PCL 5c. It has a resolution of 600 DPI.
I think I would prefer a rectangular grid like this where * is a dot and
_ is white or light color
_________
_*_*_*_*_
_________
_*_*_*_*_
_________
_*_*_*_*_
_________
which would be more distinct, I think, than a chessboard pattern like this
__________
_*_*_*_*__
__*_*_*_*_
_*_*_*_*__
__*_*_*_*_
_*_*_*_*__
__*_*_*_*_
__________
but a chessboard pattern would be better for improved density. Being able
to try both would be good because you really can't tell how it looks until
you actually see it.
Assuming that I can control each and every printer dot and that I can
print 7.5x10 inches, then I have room for 7.5x10x600x600 == 27,000,000
printer dots on the page. Since I want a million visible dots on a
square grid that means that each visible dot can be
int( sqrt( 27000000 / 1000000 )) == 5 printer dots on each side. Thus
each visible dot would look like the following in printer dots:
_____
_***_ This would allow for 16/25 white and 9/25 black, and there
_***_ would be two rows of white vertically and horizontally
_***_ between each visible dot.
_____
OR
_____
__**_ This would have much more separation between the visible dots
__**_ but the visible, 4/25 black part of the dot would be much
_____ smaller. It's hard to tell whether this or the above would
_____ be more visible when actually on paper.
The above are for the rectangular layout. A checkerboard layout would
alternate cells with visible dots with empty cells, thus giving me 1/2
the visible dot density. Thus my rectangles would be reduced to 3x3.
In order to separate dots at the corners I would have to use something
like one of the following patterns:
_*_
***
_*_
OR
***
***
_*_
Both would give more ink per visible dot than the 4/25 black pattern
above but with much more separation between dots.
Again it's hard to say which of the 4 schemes above would look the best
until I actually see it on paper.
I see three ways of doing these 4 schemes: (1) Issue lots of nearly
repetitive printer commands. (2) Build a glyph with 10x10 visible dots
in it which uses up the entire character cell space and aligns the dots
properly on each side and above and below, and then just print 10,000 of
them in a rectangle which fits on 8.5x11 paper where the last row does
not have to be the size of the other rows. (3) Make an uncompressed,
high resolution image of 1,000,000 dots and just print it, but would
there be problems in translation from image to printer?
I have another question: Assuming again that I can access each printer
dot, can I also control the size of that dot (within reason)?
That's kind of the limit of what I currently can guess for this project.
All useful hints, ideas, suggestions, etc, will be appreciated. Please
reply via this website or via the eMail address I set up for this
project:
Jeff.B.million_dots@myLetters.US Also if you know of another
forum where I could ask this question please let me know about it.
Thank you in advance,
Jeff B.
Jeff.B.million_dots@myLetters.US
