[Info-vax] HP stopping VMS paper documentation ?

[John Wallace]

On Nov 24, 4:11 pm, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
wrote:
> On 11/24/2011 10:08 AM, MG wrote:
>
> > On 24-11-2011 14:30, Michael Kraemer wrote:
> >> Not at all.
> >> You'll have to print it yourself.
>
> > With the current ink and toner cartridge prices...?
>
> >> And for that you need: An HP printer and HP ink cartridges.
>
> > Most people (in my experience, from what I've seen at university
> > and elsewhere) who, nowadays, want to print large documents go to
> > print shops. It's not exactly cheap, but still much cheaper than
> > to 'print it yourself'.
>
> > - MG
>
> The price, per copy, goes down as quantities go up.  If you want 400
> copies of a large document you can probably do it for $30 to $40 per
> copy.  The big ticket is making the plates and installing them on the
> press.  Once that's done your costs are basically paper and ink!


"making the plates and installing them on the press"

I guess you haven't looked at the print industry for a decade or more?

Look for a writeup of "digital printing" somewhere.

At the moderate volume end, there are no "plates" any more. You can
get "print on demand" from anything from the usual A4/A3 stuff to
(effectively) paperbacks on demand (have a look at lulu.com). Printing
done on what is basically an overgrown laserprinter.

At the medium and high volume end, where real plates are still used,
the cost of a plate vanishes into the other costs.

DEC's Software Distribution Centre in Ireland were using print on
demand technology to produce paper manuals back in the 1990s, if I
remember rightly.

Alpha (and in particular NT/Alpha) also had a role in the death of
"camera ready copy"; an Alpha with the right 3rd party application and
imagesetter interface card was the quickest way of getting from
PostScript to imagesetter, ready for printing. DEC also had some
interesting software for pre-flight-checking PostScript before you
actually fed it to the PostScript->raster process.