On Wed, Feb 09, 2000 at 02:35:38PM +1100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Mainly the above points, which all boil down to *quality*. (Printer > status monitoring and error reporting are important too, but aren't > really well handled under Unix, and aren't central to my question. In > fact, they're a distraction.) > > By "official support" I mean one of two things: > > 1) Releasing specs for the printer commands and protocols. > > 2) Releasing drivers (binary or source code). Unix, in general, doesn't know much about printers. Sure, there are printing extensions to X, and every couple of years someone comes out with a new-generation printer driver, but I don't know too many folk who use either. There are really two issues here: Getting the bits to the printer in a reasonable fashion, and what goes into those bits. To the best of my knowledge, Unix doesn't work at all with any of the printers that require detailed timing control of the bitstream, because the spooler is just a dumb byte-dumping engine. That limits you to printers that use serial, parallel, scsi, ethernet or USB in a fairly standard fashion, or write your own byte-pipe driver that looks a bit like a parallel port. As was mentioned before, what goes into the bits is almost universally defined by PostScript. Either the printer speaks PostScript natively (and so all of the colour rendering issues you mentioned are handled internally), or it has a GhostScript driver. If you just want Linux (or other Unix) folk to be able to use the printer _at_all_, then releasing specs for the printer comands and protocols will see to that. If you're keen to contribute code to make photo-realistic images appear on paper, then GhostScript is where to contribute the code. Unfortunately, if you contribute the source, you might find compettitors using it too. Anyone know of any other mechanisms in common use? Is anyone using a colour printer with Unix/Linux at the moment? -- Andrew -- SLUG - Sydney Linux Users Group Mailing List - http://www.slug.org.au To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe in the text
