Why are printers such a hbuttle 3041

In a message on Wed, 23 Feb 2005 10:56:24 +1300, wrote :

PostScript was never meant to be WYSIWYG!!!! A 'driver' is of course needed (by WYSIWYG desktop applications). Duh!

This is fine, expect for two problems:

What exactly is the raster bitmap format? Who defines this standard? Note that as printers increase in pixel and color depth resolution, the raster bitmap format has to change to handle this and sending a mbuttively higher resolution raster bitmap to a low-end printer is plain stupid (and generally runs into buffering problems anyway).

It is a vastly inefficient format for mostly textual content and thus has a high I-O overhead.

PostScript provides a way around all of this. The PostScript *engine* on the printer itself knows the pixel and color depth resolution and renders things as things make sense. Font glyphs are 'cached' and looked up as text characters are processed. A 'sparse' page is transmitted to the printer in an efficient manor. And if there is an issue of colour gamut or other such issues, it is possible that the graphics software can generate a proper bitmap *that can be included* in the PostScript -- PostScript does support bitmaped images.

No it is right. There is no native support for PostScript under MS-Windows. There is no such thing as a Microsoft-supplied generic PostScript driver. All of the drivers for PostScript printers shipped with MS-Windows were written and supplied by the various printer makers, not by Microsoft. Linux, *BSD and all flavors of commercial UNIX include support for 'PostScript' printers out-of-the-box -- PostScript is a standard output format for virtually all UNIX utilities that 'generate hard copy': *TeX (dvips), groff, Netscape-Mozilla, xwd, etc. MacOS from day one included the idea of a generic PostScript printer as part of the base O-S install, with a driver supplied by Apple.