On Mon, Aug 24, 1998 at 08:42:17PM -0500, gippah wrote:
| >That's because Windows knows how to talk the HP's language. Most Unix
| >programs that talk to printers talk in postscript. To print
| >postscript on your printer, one must use ghostscript to convert it to
| >a bitmap in the printer's language, and then dump that to the printer.
| >(That's also why it's so slow.)
|
| Actually it's mostly because HP supplied a printer driver for windows,
| but not for linux. Windows itself can no more talk HP's language than
| linux, probably even less so -- I'd like to see someone print to an HP
| from windows without a driver, instead trying to rely on a "filter".
This may suprise you, but Windows printer drivers are basically just
that - filters. The vast majority of Windows programs don't know
anything about specific printers, but instead `print' in a standard
format for Windows programs. Windows then takes this output, and runs
it through the appropriate `driver/filter', and then the output of
this is ultimately sent to the printer.
Unix has no such standard printing format so each program that prints
needs to know how to talk to each printer. Postscript is the defacto
standard, of course. Of course, your printing setup can have various
filters set up to print certain things correctly (for example, it can
send postscript directly to your printer, text is converted to
postscript and printed, dvi is converted to postscript and printed,
etc.) but the support for non postscript printers is definately
lacking. You can hack in ghostscript to convert postscript to your
printer's native format, but this isn't likely to work as well as
Window's setup.
As for trying to print to an HP from Windows without a driver, there's
no reason why you couldn't run a postscript file through ghostscript
and push the output into lpt1: ... no Windows driver loaded (besides
the one for the parallel port, of course), yet it would print ...
Also, you can print straight text (as long as lines are terminated
with ^J's and ^M's) directly to an HP printer ... again, no Windows
drivers involved.
| >The print quality isn't related to which computer the printer is on,
| >but instead depends on what's generating the output that the printer
| >gets. If you set it up correctly, you can put the printer on the unix
| >box and have Windows print to it via samba and get the same quality
| >you're getting now.
|
| The print quality is very much dependent upon having a specific driver
| for the printer or not.
That is basically what I said.
| From my experience of having the printer on
| both a linux and a windows machine, I can definitely say that using the
| windows 672C driver works much better than trying to use a filter
| designed for the 550C or 650C -- the closest matches. Both of these
| filters Waste ink (that's waste with a capital W) and defnitely do not
| take advantage of this printer's strengths.
And as far as I know, nobody has written in a 672c output format for
ghostscript, so you're forced to use 550c or 650c output format, which
wastes ink *and* prints line by line, even if there's nothing on that
line.
| Not to mention that the
| filters generally leave oversized margins which is again wasteful.
|
| I did find someone on the net who designed a 672C filter, but it only
| worked from netscape. Not very useful, and to be honest it looked the
| same as the other filters I mentioned above anyway.
The postscript -> ghostscript -> dj is a hack, pure and simple. If
your print job is merely one dot in the middle of the page, Windows
will have it print one dot in the middle of the page, and it'll be
done. Using ps->gs->dj, it cycles through the entire page, line by
line, printing nothing until it reaches that little dot where it
prints a little dot, then finishing the page, line by line.
If the authors of Netscape wanted to make a deskjet output format and
did it right, it could give you the same print quality that you've
gotten used to from Windows. The same goes for any Unix application
... the problem is that it needs to be done for each application.
Actually, ghostscript does have a lot of room for improvement in
making it a better ps->whatever print filter. If done right, it could
be almost as good as Window's print driver system. Not quite as good,
unless printer manufacturers start shipping ghostscript patches along
with their Windows drivers, but it could certainly be *much* better
than it is now.
--
Doug McLaren, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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