brandon s. allbery wrote:
>The evil thing about PostScript is that it is a full programming
>language.
That's not evil- it's useful.
>if you run a job through
>Ghostscript to get the page count, not only does it take longer to
>print but it's also possible to write PostScript code which generates
>1 page from Ghostscript and 200 on a real printer
Hmmm.. well, this would make sense, except...
It's the same input data in both cases!
Think about this-
Input job X -> Ghostscript -> output Y (1 page)
Input job X -> Printer firmware -> output Z (200 pages)
Since both black box software systems received the same input data
but produced different results, the contents of the boxes cannot be
the same. Note that the complexity of the input data is factored
out by the fact that once the data has been queued, it is static.
The complexity issue comes into play only in that you need a page
counter that exactly apes the printer firmware, and rising complexity
makes this task more difficult.
>The LPRng HOWTO says it best: printer accounting is a lost cause.
Either that, or it is a classic case of determinism. That is, once
you have decided that a thing cannot be done, you stop thinking and
searching for a solution, and instead quote dogma.
Look folks, yes, Postscript is complex. But printers do not eat
Postscript and interpret it by black magic! They use software to
do it- so, if one could mirror that software externally, you could
indeed produce a true page count- "true" being simply "how printer
X would react to the same data."
What would be truly interesting- have a real, live Postscript file
that would produce one page on printer A and 200 on printer B. This
would mean that Postscript itself is a weak standard (or perhaps
that printer firmware vendors are idiots.) brandon, is this the real
issue you are aiming at? In other words, Postscript isn't (just)
complex, but is too complex for printer vendors to figure out? I
submit that would indeed pose a problem. But even then, it should be
possible to mirror the bugs in any one given printer's firmware.
Remember, it isn't magic!
Cheers.
--
The box said Windows 95 or better, so I installed Linux!
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