SJS wrote:
Um... the postscript patent has expired. At least postscript level 1 can
be implemented without encumbrances. Level 2 should be expiring soon.
You'd think that the expensive of adding a postscript interpreter to
a printer would be minimal in this day and age.
The problem is RAM. Printers are being ever pushed to be cheaper while,
at the same time, being pushed to handle larger and larger documents in
terms of resolution.
A Postscript printer has to keep, at minimum, 8.5x11x600x600 bytes of
RAM, about 33 megabytes. More if we have more that 8-bit grayscale or
want to do color conversion post-rendering. 33 Megabytes doesn't fit on
a nice cheap System on a Chip. So, instead of having a single chip to
control everything, you need a chip with a RAM interfaces and a stick of
RAM (probably cheaper than the chips).
Thus, we wind up with printers that try to do as little as possible and
force the host system to do the rendering.
To be fair: I don't find that a bad tradeoff if the manufacturers would
just document the raster protocol. A printer is almost always going to
have less power and memory than a computer.
The issue is that printer manufacturers won't document their raster
protocols, and Postscript gains a benefit from being a lingua franca.
-a
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