Jonathan Drews writes: > > I am not sure why you want to avoid CUPS. Not a terrible propsal because it is a bloated piece of crap, but on the other hand it must interface with the satanc devices we call printers so concessions must perhaps be made.
> fundamentals. That begs the question as to why a desktop user would > use a complicated system like OpenBSD. Short answer: Generally, don't. OpenBSD is not designed for users. They might (and frequently do) get some mileage out of it but when something goes wrong they're in the same place as the rest of us: on their own. > I never could get CUPS working in previous versions of OpenBSD. I'm afraid I've never tried because I just gave up on printing. Paying 10p per sheet to do it around the corner is easier, cheaper and puts my sanity at less risk (but librarians, man...). On the few occasions when cups has been the answer, I've spun up or found somewhere a linux box/VM and used that. God knows what it's doing underneath as I mash my way through the clicky gui but I can just print the dozen or so sheets I need and nuke the entire thing without having to care about such trivial concerns as security or long-term reliability. Good luck. > Also, IIRC CUPS requires chown and chmod to certain /dev files. I am > loathe to do that. I really don't want to mess with root file > permissions. IMHO, if you need a service, then add your account to > the appropriate group in /etc/groups. This is almost certainly possible and has already been arranged for. > According to Xerox's web page on Postscript, they claim that > Postscript gives higher quality renderings: > > "Unlike PCL, PostScript is device independent. This means that the > PostScript language creates all of the print data and does not rely > on the printer for print data. This allow the output to be > consistent when printed on more than one type of printer or print > device. Specifically, the graphic objects will be consistent and in > some cases of higher quality than PCL." This is misleading at best. PCL may be device-dependent but it's never used until the device is known and only for the final communication with that device. Whether it and your computer use PCL as a private protocol to convey part-processed postscript is a largely irrelevant cost-saving method introduced by printer manufacturers so that they don't need to implement a full-blown (turing-complete) postscript interpreter in what these days is disposable hardware. Their last sentence is as close as you can get to an outright lie without actually lying. As mentioned elsewhere, postscript is just a programme which is interpreted by a software running on a CPU to produce a raster image. What does it matter whether it's done by your computer's CPU or the printer's? Matthew
