From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Oct 18 5:10:12 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mailman.zeta.org.au (mailman.zeta.org.au [203.26.10.16]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3E33D14BFD for ; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 05:10:07 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from atrn@zeta.org.au) Received: from ska.bsn (beefcake.zeta.org.au [203.26.10.12]) by mailman.zeta.org.au (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id WAA07388 for ; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 22:13:18 +1000 Received: (from andy@localhost) by ska.bsn (8.9.3/8.9.3) id WAA00758 for freebsd-chat@freebsd.org; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 22:23:40 +1000 (EST) (envelope-from andy) Message-Id: <199910181223.WAA00758@ska.bsn> Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 22:23:40 +1000 (EST) From: atrn@zeta.org.au Subject: [keramida@ceid.upatras.gr: Re: printers (was Re: keyboards)] To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Brian O'Connor wrote: >>> One of the big stumbling blocks is the lack of an abstract printing >>> model for applications. > > er.. I thought thats what postscript was. In a way but as has been pointed out apps specific code to produce the print. The X print server tries to help but the X graphics model isn't the best. It is only recently that Postscript is getting good support for the types of things you want to do in color printing (level 3 has some nice things) but not everyone has that and different Postscript implementations have different bugs and/or behavior which kills a lot of the supposed portability. There are some other issues too which make it less than ideal. People have solved them but it took quite a while (e.g., general N-up printing is theoretically nasty). Postscript gives a little too much freedom. > I thought the postscript ppd model did this, it works well for Irix. It works but PPD was a reaction to a problem. PPD was added when people discovered that portable documents weren't so portable after all -- Chuck Berry lied about the promised land To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message