Hewlett Packard Plotter

Stakeholders applaud N 1.42b for Geosciences in Varsities

For deploying a whooping sum of N1.42 billion to 11universities in Nigeria for the purpose of bringing their Geoscience departments to world standard, the Univerisity Assistance Programme, bankrolled by Mobil Producing Nigeria and its co-sponsors, has been commended by stakeholders.

According to Dr Mary Olowookere, Head of Geoscience department, Federal University of Technology, Akure, the programme has brought a great improvement to the teaching and learning of Geosciences, which empowers students graduating from Nigerian universities to be competitive in a world that has become a global village.

Olowookere also gives kudos to the training programme organized for lecturers of benefiting universities to ensure an effective use of the facilities in the constructed mini- Geoscience workrooms, explaining that the training has improved the competence of the lecturers which will reflect on the quality of their students, especially with the aid of the modern equipment provided by the sponsors.

A sum of about N132m has been spent on the programme in each of the benefitting universities for the construction of mini- Geosciences workroom equipped with four interpretation duck stations, discussion table with six revolving chairs, a manager’s desk and writing board. For safety, the workroom is protected with security doors and burglary proof windows as well as air conditioners.

Each of the universities also get the following hardwares: four sun blade unix machines, DLT tape drive, 300m 16 ports switch, Hp design jet plotter, Dell 19’ flat screen, high end PC and APC UPS (1.5 Kva). These hardwares are supported by software including four Geoframe Runtime licences, two IESX licences with synthetics, two Geology office licences and solaris operating systems.

A 30 KVA generator is also provided to each of the universities to ensure an effective utilization of the equipment. While the software is donated by Schlumberger, CBC Computer provides installation and basic maintenance support for a limited period.

In the first phase of the UAP project, which was completed in 2007, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-If; Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and Nmandi Azikiwe University, Akwa benefited from the University Assistance Programme. And in the second phase completed in 2010 the Geoscience departments of the University of Benin, University of Ilorin, Federal University of Technology, Owerri, University of Calabar and Delta State University, Abraka got the much-needed assistance.

Printer Solutions: HP Graphics Language (HP GL), (Printer Languages)

The Hewlett Packard Graphics Language (HP GL) is widely used by pen plotters used to produce engineering drawings. HP GL has been widely emulated by other plotter manufacturers, and is the de facto standard language for pen plotters. A pen plotter is a slow device, a complex drawing can easily take have an hour to plot, and plotters are often noisy and difficult to set up. For these reasons many laser printers offer an HP GL emulation, normally copying the HP7475A desktop plotter, which can be used for draft prints of drawings. As most laser printers do not print in color, and cannot print on the very large paper sizes used by plotters, they are normally only used for draft prints, but in a few situations, such as printed circuit board designs, laser printers are used in preference to plotters. HP GL version 2 has been incorporated into the PCL 5 language to provide PCL with vector graphics capabilities. HPGL uses two-letter mnemonics as instructions for drawing lines, circles, text, and simple symbols. HPGL has evolved over the years as HP added features to its line of pen, electrostatic, inkjet, and laser plotters and printers. There is one primary drawback to HPGL: it is bulkier than other plotting languages, which means it takes longer to transmit an HPGL plot file. To overcome the limitation, Hewlett-Packard in 1988 introduced HPGL/2, which featured "polyline encoding," a form of data compression that reduces the plot file size and, hence, transmission time by two-thirds. The original HP/GL-Language does not support definition of line width, as this parameter was determined by the pens loaded into the plotter. With the advent of the first inkjet plotters, line width for the "pens" specified within the HP/GL-files had to be set at the printer so it would know what line width to print for each pen, a cumbersome and error-prone process. With HP/GL-2, definition of line width was introduced into the language and allowed for elimination of this step. Also, among other improvements a binary format was defined that allowed for smaller files and shorter file transfer times, and the minimal resolution was reduced.

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