Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on April 20, 2006 02:25 AM
Already, Linux printing is a total mess! Printing a simple document requires that it be piped through half a dozen or more conversions. The document is piped from its native application and format to lpr or cups, pswrite, pstops, ghostscript, foomatic-rip and eventually to the device-url. It's ridiculous, difficult to setup, problematic, dificult to troubleshoot and slow.
Now you suggest using PDF as the intermediate format instead of Postscript further adding to the madness. But, I look around at the more than 50 printers within view and I don't see a single one that speaks PDF! The vast majority of them speak PCL and a few speak Postscript as well as PCL but, none speak PDF. Why on earth would you choose a format that is completely unsupported by any printer? Why not, instead, implement a supported printer language that can eliminate some of the conversions presently required to print a simple page? We already have a few languages that are supported by the printer manufacturers, Linux needs to use those languages and PDF is not one of them. Besides everything else, Ghostscript is a crappy PDF implementation!
Why must Linux continue to be a mutant fish swimming upstream?
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Linux - Mutant Fish Swimming Upstream
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 20, 2006 02:25 AMNow you suggest using PDF as the intermediate format instead of Postscript further adding to the madness. But, I look around at the more than 50 printers within view and I don't see a single one that speaks PDF! The vast majority of them speak PCL and a few speak Postscript as well as PCL but, none speak PDF. Why on earth would you choose a format that is completely unsupported by any printer? Why not, instead, implement a supported printer language that can eliminate some of the conversions presently required to print a simple page? We already have a few languages that are supported by the printer manufacturers, Linux needs to use those languages and PDF is not one of them. Besides everything else, Ghostscript is a crappy PDF implementation!
Why must Linux continue to be a mutant fish swimming upstream?
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