At 09:39 AM 1/7/01 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I personally have decided that given the cleverness of
>students^H^H^H^H^H^H^Husers that it is not worth my time and effort
>to try to be as clever in this area.
Well, your time is certainly yours to use as you please. I know
there are a lot of people who use LPRng who are happy you take the
time to support it. But I will never raise a white flag to the
"cleverness" of anybody. I think for myself. Other people having
given up in the past is not a good reason to do, or not do, anything.
Due to the nature of the beast named Postscript it is impossible to
write a bulletproof page parser for the set of all printers. It is
very possible to do so for any given printer X, however.
Why? The queued job is static, and the printer firmware is static.
There exist a infinite number of Postscript hacks, but this is
irrelevant. Ultimately, a fixed data stream is going to collide with
a fixed program. If you had an external interpreter that aped the
printer's interpreter, you are going to be able to predict with
certainty what will happen. Infinite possibilities must be reduced
to one at page render time. This theory is unassailable.
In real life, it is unlikely that a printer vendor is going to open
source their interpreter code. This leaves one with only reverse
engineering possibilities. This is the true problem.
I conclude that this isn't really about "cleverness" at all, but
about the evils of not having source available.
One workaround for me is to downconvert to HP PCL. Or develop a
parser that works smoothly with Postscript code despooled through a
Windows driver- that way, if the predicted and actual page counts do
not match, then some variety of Postscript spoof was used, and the
individual who queued the job can be sacked.
I wish to thank those who have commented on this subject. I will
concede that I did not have a full and proper understanding of the
Postscript language before being enlightened here.
Cheers.
--
"Bill Gates is just a monocle and a Persian Cat away from being
one of the bad guys in a James Bond movie." - Dennis Miller
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