Obviously, the program needs some space. This however is not really much. The program is (at the time) approximately 65 KByte large.
Then however, the bitmap that is to be printed must be kept in storage. The program reserves as much space as possible for this end, in the best case to get the entire bitmap for a page in the memory. This hunger for memory can be limited with the <#120#>-m<#120#> option, however. Then the program will divide the bitmap up in strips and will print one strip after the other. If you are printing in the landscape mode, however, the entire bitmap must be in memory and the <#121#>-m<#121#> option is ignored. In this case it can happen that the program needs a coherent chunk of memory space of 1 Megabyte.
A further, significant memory eater is the font pool. In this the fonts are loaded. Is this space chosen too small, the program has to load and purge fonts continuously, which slows down the speed of printing considerably. The default value for the memory size has been set to 100 KByte. This can however be enlarged or reduced with the <#122#>-b<#122#> option. The optimal size of the fontpool depends on the resolution of the output on the printer, as well as on the number of different fonts used in the TEXdocument.
Contrary to this, the two printer buffers, which are supposed to make the printout evenly (fast), only minimal. The default is a size of 10 KByte each. Thus all in all 20 KByte is needed. You can make them smaller though, with a clear conscience, with the <#123#>-e<#123#> option. If you set it below approximately 1 KByte however, the printout will become pretty slow.
With the default values the program needs thus a maximum
of 700 KByte. With the <#124#>-m<#124#> and the <#125#>-b<#125#> options,
(per magnitude of resolution;