On 9 Feb, Andrew Reilly wrote: > Unix, in general, doesn't know much about printers. Yes. While I hate M$, it beats Unix in the area of printer handling. > There are really two issues here: Getting the bits to the > printer in a reasonable fashion, and what goes into those bits. For my query, it's only the latter that's important. All the Canon BJ printers are well-behaved in this regard. Just dump the data to them, basically. > 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. Yes. > 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. Possible, if GS supports loading of shared libraries on demand per-printer. I haven't examined the internals of GS to see if this is possible. > 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. I know that. Yet, knowing that, I asked my question in the way I did. :-) I think my plan has a better chance for a happy result. > 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. Exactly. Snowballs in hell spring to mind. :-) Companies aren't too keen on this approach, because it would tend to invalidate their patents and give away their closely-guarded technology to their competitors. Realistically, this just won't happen. > Anyone know of any other mechanisms in common use? Is anyone > using a colour printer with Unix/Linux at the moment? Can I correct that to: photo-quality colour printer with Unix/Linux? luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux Users Group Mailing List - http://www.slug.org.au To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe in the text
