Terry wrote:
| PS? Postscript? Such things still exist?
lol ... Yes, in more ways than you might think ... PDFs are essentially
embedded
PostScript (PS) Code, placed into this new format. Somewhere the code must
be
translated to something that a printer might understand ... Early on, the PS
Interpreter was placed inside the printer (as FirmWare) and given a brain
(processor) to translate the code. This is still a very good way to handle
printing
in a large, shared environment; the PS/PDF is rather small in size to a
rasterized
image of a printable page (especially when only text is involved), so the
transfer
via the network is smaller. And the processor in the printer handles all
the CPU
Intensive stuff and not your computer...
Nowadays, many of us have our own local printer and plenty of CPU Power, so
the rasterization done locally in software isn't an issue anymore. But the
top-
of-the-line printers cost money and people end up sharing the resource.
There
are now even "PDF Printers" on the market that handle the PDF Document,
locally.
- Mark Jurich
