Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 21:10:45 -0500 From: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> To: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: printers (was Re: keyboards) Message-ID: <199910180210.VAA33334@nospam.hiwaay.net> In-Reply-To: Message from Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> of "18 Oct 1999 01:40:50 %2B0300." <86d7udbogd.fsf@localhost.hell.gr>
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Giorgos Keramidas writes: > atrn@zeta.org.au writes: > > > One of the big stumbling blocks is the lack of an abstract printing > > model for applications. > > This is mainly a problem caused by the totally incompatible ways in which > printers of today are talking to their soft-partners, the drivers that each > company uses and distributes for that 'other' OS, if I am not mistaken. Of > course, having some standards like, say, PCL or PostScript is fine, but it > does not give us the possibility to use those 'extra' features each printer > might have. Anyway, this is often caused by the fact that the 'proprietary' > driver distributed with the printer for some of the 'famous' OSes, does not > have to let anyone know how it does this, or what it's telling to the printer > over that serial or parallel cable -- and this suits the company that made the > printer incredibly, since they can often hide some of their newest and > oh-so-cool hacks that make the printer print in such astonishing colors, or > with such amazing quality. > > The result of all this is that, unless you're using Windows for printing, > you're a bit out of luck, even with all the efforts of teams like the > GNU or Alladin Ghostscript developers to provide us with a good, quality set > of tools for printing under Unix. However, what I usually do in environments > that more than one PC is available, is to hook the printer on some Windows > machine, install all those neat drivers over there, and let the others print > over the network with Samba. It's worked for me so far, and I certainly hope > it will keep working for some time. This is not a true 'unix-solution' but > it's the best thing I could think of, so far. > > It seems that it's an evil printing world out there... Over many years I've been quite pleased with the way a Macintosh prints. Have never gotten into any serious development work but one could do quite acceptable printing from a Mac application by simply replacing the window GrafPort with one allocated by the print system. At that point the current window is a virtual page on the printer. A Mac PICT resource was nothing more than a recording of drawing system calls and was quite handy at preserving the vectors of a drawing, also font, size, and text. Simply drawing a PICT to a printer GrafPort reproduced it on a sheet of paper. Unix's lack of an abstract printer layer such as what Apple has is just one more example of how Unix was hurt in the 80's by all of the manufacturer's fighting about user interfaces. Damnit, I wish Apple would release a MacWM to run on all the Unix platforms. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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