Re: [OT] Printer with or without Postscript

[Wols Lists]

On 13/10/15 11:09, Johan Vromans wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Oct 2015 10:39:35 +1100
> Andrew Bernard <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> > Whatever page description
>> > language your printer uses internally, the printer driver software on
>> > your computer will convert your file to that language format and print
>> > it.
>> > [...]
>> > Postscript itself is still highly relevant, PDF is essentially a
>> > Postscript description, and lilypond can generate postscript, which is
>> > rendered wth Ghostscript - a software RIP.
> While this is true, one may not underestimate the role of the printer
> driver or software RIP. PostScript is a full-fledged programming language
> and a PostScript RIP must carefully implement all programming language
> aspects in full. PDF (for printing) is a page description and hence easier
> to implement and to process. As a reference, there are several PDF RIPs
> (viewers) based on a number of PDF libraries, while there is only one
> PostScript RIP.
> 
> For this reason I switched to PDF several years ago, after having been
> writing PostScript generating tools since 1985. For the end user, a
> PostScript generating tool has a big and sometimes hard dependency: a good
> software or hardware RIP.

And this is why I hate Postscript - just another indirection layer to
screw things up :-)

Bit after your timescale - mid-1990s, we had a Canon photocopier and
FIRE rip unit, and when it went wrong it was a real pain. Once a
document broke the ripper, I could never fix it and the only solution
was to redo the document from scratch - I could never get it to print
again :-(

Cheers,
Wol