a separate server machine and may be remotely located from the tables which are stored in the other data repositories 135 also one or more of the modules may themselves be distributed pooled or otherwise grouped such as for load balancing reliability or security reasons different configurations and locations of programs and data are contemplated for use with techniques of described herein a variety of distributed computing techniques are appropriate for implementing the components of the illustrated embodiments in a distributed manner including but not limited to tcp ip sockets rpc rmi http web services xml rpc jax rpc soap etc etc other variations are possible also other functionality could be provided by each component module or existing functionality could be distributed amongst the components modules in different ways yet still achieve the functions of a plotter image generation system 120 furthermore in some embodiments some or all of the components of the plotter image generation system 120 may be implemented or provided in other manners such as at least partially in firmware and or hardware including but not limited to one or more application specific integrated circuits asics standard integrated circuits controllers e g by executing appropriate instructions and including microcontrollers and or embedded controllers field programmable gate arrays fpgas complex programmable logic devices cplds etc some or all of the system components and or data structures may also be stored e g as executable or other machine readable.