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Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 11:06:16 +1000
From: "Brian O'Connor. (CF583173) HO 2nd Floor" <boconno6@ford.com>
To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org
Subject: [keramida@ceid.upatras.gr: Re: printers (was Re: keyboards)]
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keramida@ceid.upatras.gr wrote:

>atrn@zeta.org.au writes:
>
>> David Kelly wrote:
>> > As a result, I don't buy these products. Even for a WinNT application.
>> 
>> Some of us on the inside try to promote the idea that Unix should be
>> supported but without customers actually asking for this support the powers
>> that be don't listen.
>
>Well, thank you David... it's exactly this kind of people that we Unix users
>need to be working in these 'inside' parts of key companies, because it really 
>makes me feel better to know that saying "I'm not buying, because I have the
>honor and curse to be running *BSd at home" somebody is actually going to hear 
>this and somehow care about it.
>
>> One of the big stumbling blocks is the lack of an abstract printing
>> model for applications.

er.. I thought thats what postscript was.

>
>This is mainly a problem caused by the totally incompatible ways in which
>printers of today are talking to their soft-partners, the drivers that each
>company uses and distributes for that 'other' OS, if I am not mistaken.  Of
>course, having some standards like, say, PCL or PostScript is fine, but it
>does not give us the possibility to use those 'extra' features each printer
>might have.

I thought the postscript ppd model did this, it works well for Irix.

ie copy <new printer>.ppd from windows driver  or from vendor(ie hp) or from
adobe to the appropriate place, rehash the printer info, and add the queue.
The printer manager now shows the extra features(duplex, hi res etc) when you.
select that queue, and they are available via "lp -o <option>"

I have had no end of trouble with non postscript printers, and found postscript
printers to be a delight!! From the NEC Noisywriter(ie silentwriter ;) Lexmark
40xx series, Apple laserwriter, and (mostly) HP laserjet, although, like Micro$oft
HP don't think that postscript should begin with a %!PS, they print some PCL crap
in the header...grrr

>            Anyway, this is often caused by the fact that the 'proprietary'
>driver distributed with the printer for some of the 'famous' OSes, does not
>have to let anyone know how it does this, or what it's telling to the printer
>over that serial or parallel cable -- and this suits the company that made the 
>printer incredibly, since they can often hide some of their newest and
>oh-so-cool hacks that make the printer print in such astonishing colors, or
>with such amazing quality.
>
>The result of all this is that, unless you're using Windows for printing,
>you're a bit out of luck, even with all the efforts of teams like the
>GNU or Alladin Ghostscript developers to provide us with a good, quality set
>of tools for printing under Unix.  However, what I usually do in environments
>that more than one PC is available, is to hook the printer on some Windows
>machine, install all those neat drivers over there, and let the others print
>over the network with Samba.  It's worked for me so far, and I certainly hope
>it will keep working for some time.  This is not a true 'unix-solution' but
>it's the best thing I could think of, so far.

Isn't Samba great!, its just one of those tools that makes life fun. Before
Samba, at another job, we did a similar thing with appletalk. We had a lexmark
that was appletalk only. So we printed to it via CAP. worked perfectly. Thats
the great thing about UNIX, its just so flexible.

>
>It seems that it's an evil printing world out there...

Hopefully Linux will help here.

boc
-- 
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Brian O'Connor                    Ford Email: boconno6@ford.com
Unix Consultant to                Ford Telephone: +61 3 93597848
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