The higher resolution of the laser printers and the higher quality fonts has actually made the reports more readable in some cases. However, the proportional fonts and multiple font sizes can make the simple database reverse engineering much more difficult than with the monospaced, fixed size mainframe report fonts. Beyond special fonts, some COOL documents use a bit-mapped format. These formats are something like PC laser printers or PC screens with their elaborate graphics. Being more complex, page images created in these formats require more COOL storage.
Most COOL systems use compression.
Some use a simple blank space removal compression algorithm. Other systems add more sophisticated compression that can double the compression achieved with simple space removal. The estimates below can be used to do the initial sizing for the storage for a COOL system. After processing even one week of output, the exact size of an average COOL image can easily be determined. It is important to remember that there are often special cases.