Sponsored By
Efika 5200B Project
RIP boxin category Applications & Software
proposed by pedxing on 5th February 2006 (accepted on 11th February 2006)
Project Summary
The first thing that I want to develop with this board is a RIP (raster image processor) system. In the print industry you will often times see companies marrying cheap hardware with expensive software solutions. The resultant imaging looks wonderful but at the cost of extremely slow processing speeds. I would like to build a RIP system on top of one of these boards that not only is an image RIP but also a job controller, print manager, and queue system that is built to interpret and run a jdf document workflow by extrapolating the neccessary data and passing it though an OSS (ghostscript, et al.) chain.This is a stable and proven industry that does not require new customers, is open to technology change, and has a desperate need for solid jdf workflow solutions. We are in the process of tying the sotware pieces all together right now and are looking for a clean hardware design to build on. My hope is that the EFIKA setup is exactly what we are looking for.
Project Blog Entries
I have accepted a new position at a wonderfully progressive shop and will be given even more resources to develop this system! We have 4 graphic designers on staff so things like UI and usability will be nailed into place by others that are much more talented than I in that respect. I am very excited about the continuation of this project and look forward to getting this moved to an actual dev box as we start looking at real performance.
still waiting on the dev kit. =( my only hope is that SOMEONE is still monitoring these pages for updates and will consider this a project worthy of further interest.
I have continued to select and develop software. This project has grown and now the vision includes creating a turn-key publishing workstation based on 100% free software. This will include pre-configured installations of ghostscript, (absolutely mandatory for the ps pdf workflow anyway)Scribus, The Gimp, tex, lyx, ps2pdf, bookland.py, and various other python chunks that will tie it all together.
I'm at the point where the legwork is basically done and now having a dev kit will be the major pushing point to continue development.