FARGO Dye Sublimation Color Printer

P R E L I M I N A R Y

The Fargo color printer is attached to csbhis. It can be used for high-quality, near-photographic, publication-quality printing.

Although the Fargo also supports a faster and cheaper medium-quality thermal wax printing, we do not recommend or support this mode. For less-than-publication quality printing, it is easier, cheaper, and usually just as rewarding, to use the Epson printer.

Graphic Formats

The Fargo printer is driven with by software from APUNIX. The software supports postscript (.ps), tiff, gif, jpeg, Sun Raster (.ras) and Portable Any Map. Unfortunately, it does not support SGI's raster format (.rgb).

By judicious use of image conversion tools it should be possible to print your picture on the Fargo. In the fullness of time, there will doubtless be included in this guide, a section on how best to accomplish this.

Printing Guide

WARNING!

It is essential to use these commands correctly, to avoid damage to the printer!

Turn on the fargo printer. The power switch is in the back, above the power cord.
Obtain the proper paper from Pat Fleming or other CSB Core staff. Load the paper in the tray, glossy side down.
Log onto csbhis. Type, setup fargo. Then, give the command to print your picture:
rasto -z -p -M -P sA -v yourfile.tiff
Wait patiently while the software processes your image, then sends it to the Fargo printer in four passes of up to ten minutes each.
When you are all done, turn off the printer.

**Elements of the Command Line**
`rasto`	required	alias for rastopictura printing program
`-z`	optional	zoom picture to fill page. See discussion of scaling.
`-p`	required	indicates that you are using the dye-sub ribbon. Note that this is a lower-case `p`.
`-M`	required	Pre-calculate picture as image file on disk before sending it to the Fargo. The file will be in $IMGTMPDIR, and will be large. $IMGTMPDIR is defined when you `setup fargo`.
`-P sA`	required	specifies the papersize you are using. See table of papaersizes below. Note that this option uses an upper-case `P` followed by a space, followed by the paper size code. Also note that case is important in specifiying the paper size.
`-v`	optional	print interesting information on the screen. If you use upper-case `V`, you get all the interesting diagnostics, but the picture will not actually be printed.
`-G gamma`	optional	Specify gamma correction. Default is 1.0.
`-h heat`	optional caution	Specify heat applied to print head. Default is 50, range is [1,96]. Higher values make the print darker. Use caution -- action of this switch has not been verified.
`yourfile.tiff`	required	replace with the name of the file you are printing. If it ends in .Z, it

Paper Sizes

The following table gives paper size codes, and their corresponding dimensions. At this writing, we have stocks of sA and sB paper.

(If you would like to order your own supplies the ordering information is available.)

**Paper Size Codes and Dimensions**
Code	`A`	`Ae`	`A4`	`A4e`	`sA`	`B`	`A3`	`sB`
Dimensions (in.)	8.5x11	8.5x13	8.3x11.7	8.3x13.7	9x14	11x17	11.7x16.5	12x20
Dimensions (mm)	216x279	216x330	210x297	210x348	229x356	279x432	297x420	305x508

Scaling

The Fargo has an effective resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch). A picture that takes an entire screen on an SGI workstation is 1280x1024 pixels, which scales to 4.3x3.7 inches on the Fargo -- not very large. One solution is to use the -z switch. Unfortunately, -z is inflexible: it will only scale the picture to a predefined paper size.

For best quality, the original graphics program should be instructed to produce an output file which will be the correct size in pixels (or in inches for a postscript file). Failing this, you should produce as large a picture as possible, Then use either the -z switch to scale your picture to one of the supported paper sizes, or the appropriate imtools utility to scale your picture to the desired size.

Last Modified: Monday, 15-Mar-1999 11:39:57 EST