Dilwyn Jones wrote:
So it looks like the chain of software is:
[snip]
4. A final 'driver' then takes care of the fine detail of sending
raster graphics to the printer itself, which will be different for
every printer.
Step 4 is possibly not needed if the Postscript interpreter such as
Ghostscript can drive the printer in question direct, or if the end
printing is done by the underlying operating system's drivers. The
need for a separate driver for each and every different type of
printer basically means this will never happen I suppose.
Yes, you still need a driver, of course. Here is the list of printers
Ghostscript natively supports:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/printer.htm
However, it doesn't necessarily stop there. There's also GIMP
Print, for example, which provides more drivers for Ghostscript. I
think their range of supported printers is pretty impressive:
http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/p_Supported_Printers.php3
Note that I have NO IDEA how difficult it is to port those drivers to
SMSQ/E. But at least there is available source at all that could be
ported. In the ideal case they just need to be recompiled (but I
haven't had a look at them at all).
And of course, Ghostscript can also be used to produce PDF files or
different other graphics formats instead of output for the printer.
One problem is that the Ghostscript for QDOS is pretty old, because at
some higher version it just broke and Jonathan didn't want to
investigate why. Perhaps with the help of QDOS-GCC later versions
could be ported (I think it was some compiler problem).
Or do we then need a 'postscript printer' or 'postscript to
non-esp/p(2)' converter to finally get the output to the printer.
Right.
I was afraid of that.
Of course only on non-postscript printers. Postscript printers are
available and will be for a while, I guess, but not in the low cost
market.
In QPC this would indeed be how you could do it.
...because Windows handles the postscript to raster process.
No, it's still Ghostscript that does this, but it can be included in a
way that looks like a printer to applications.
In other words, not that much better than printing existing control
codes as we know them and have Windows send that to the printer as
QPC does now?
Well, I do think being able to print to any available Windows
printer is much better than being able to only print to a few select
printers.
Unfortunately, I am even less confident of a solution now. Especially
with QL, Q40 or something else which would need specific drivers.
I don't see any solution for the QL. It's too slow and has not enough
memory. The Q40 (or maybe even SGC) should however be able to cope
with Ghostscript just fine, I guess. And then you could potentially
drive any printer the Linux guys wrote a driver for.
Marcel
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