Re: High-res printing

[James W. W. <os...@jw...>]

On Jul 29, 2005, at 6:57 AM, Edward K. Chew wrote:

> So I have been running various tests on this printing algorithm I  
> wrote and noticed that if I push things too far, I begin to see  
> black bands occupy the right or bottom edges of the printout.  For  
> example, an 11 x 17 page in landscape mode at 300 dpi is too far.   
> I am not certain whether I am hitting some sort of limit in the 3D  
> rendering or the printer driver, but I suspect the former.  Of  
> course, there could also be a bug in my code...  :-)
>
> Assuming it's the rendering, would it help if I switched to a  
> divide-and-conquer strategy, rendering it in pieces through careful  
> manipulation of the viewport?  Am I likely to get noticeable  
> artifacts along the borders of each piece?  If this is the way to  
> go, does anyone know how large each pieces can safely be?  8.5 x 11  
> @ 300 dpi seems to print fine.  Assuming a half-inch margin all  
> around, that works out to 2250 x 3000 pixels or thereabouts.  My  
> guess is that the limit lies somewhere in the range of 3000 to 5000  
> pixels.

OpenGL has a limit on viewport size, but the exact value depends on  
the renderer.  Are you running on Mac or Windows?  If Mac, is it  
Tiger or earlier?  I seem to recall a value of 2048 on Mac pre-Tiger.

Yes, it is possible to tile an image using the camera viewport and  
the drawContext pane.