On Nov 15, 2006, at 3:48 PM, David Boyes wrote:
Pretty much any printer that supports both Macs and PCs does
PostScript,
as the Apple folks blew off PCL support entirely and went straight to
PostScript.
There was a time (1985/1986 ?) when the most powerful computer Apple
shipped was their LaserWriter printer, which had a 68020 in it.
[If you have a spare week or two, I'll send you a ray tracing program
written in PostScript (allows you to render shiny glass balls using
nothing but the CPU in your printer. Guaranteed to make you the most
unpopular person in your entire office when you monopolize the laser
printer for DAYS at a time to produce single pages of output....
8-)). ]
Unfortunately, if you do your PS-to-printer-raster conversion in
GhostScript on the host, it doesn't take nearly so long.
The side effect to downloadable fonts is that they consume memory
in the
printer that is otherwise available for buffering print data. If the
page is sufficiently complex, you can get situations where the printer
is unable to buffer a full page of output and just tosses the part it
can't handle (this used to be very common with the original Laserjets
and Laserjet II printers, but hasn't been much of a problem
recently --
at least if we're talking about printers that aren't the totally cheap
bottom-of-the-line units).
RAM finally got so cheap that you can put enough in a printer that
the actual amount of total RAM needed to hold a page image at full
resolution is only a small fraction of what you have in the printer.
Which is why it's no longer a problem. Resolution on desktop/small-
office printers hasn't really increased much in the last decade or
so, while price per bit has continued to plummet.
They also go away with a power-cycle of the
printer, so you pretty much have to assume you're going to send the
font
down to the printer with every job.
But again, even 10Mbps Ethernet, or even 1Mbps USB 1.0 means that
it's not a big deal to do so, and it does not take long. Not like it
was with a 9600bps parallel connection.
Adam
