The Network Plot Management System

The Print Servers:

Whatever the Plot Server does with a job, finally there is a file which can be printed/plotted. Since the output device can be connected to a system somewhere in the network, the Plot Server passes the file to one of the Print Servers - again using the internal communication utilities based on RPC/sockets.

A Print Server controls the final output of the job on the device. It actually starts a separate output process for each job and is therefore able to handle different devices connected to the system on which it runs. There are several special output processes available for the different output methods - cat, lp/lpr, ftp ...