On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 5:37 PM, J.R. Mauro<jrm8...@gmail.com> wrote: > IJS is probably it; that's the PCL driver for the home-office class printers.
IJS is not PCL. IJS is a custom protocol that is spoken between a bitmap-producing program like Ghostscript and a bitmap-printing program like /usr/bin/hpijs http://svn.ghostscript.com/ghostscript/branches/mtrender/ijs/ijs_spec.pdf /usr/bin/hpijs speaks IJS to Ghostscript (or whatever is on standard input/output) and speaks a new HP protocol called LIDIL to the printer on the other end. Rather than commit to a full specification of LIDIL and have to worry about backwards compatibility in the future, HP chose to use IJS as a shim protocol and distribute a binary that talks to the printer (source is available but it's still a binary). PCL is not in the picture. Getting PCL out of the picture is exactly the reason that IJS and LIDIL were introduced, because LIDIL is basically "here is a bitmap" whereas PCL is a real language that requires actual memory and computing power inside the printer. LIDIL moves the memory and computing requirements out of the printer into the computer proper. Russ
