[Desktop_architects] Presentation slides - with attached templates

Egbert Eich eich at suse.de
Wed Dec 7 11:40:22 PST 2005


Michael Sweet writes:
 > Egbert Eich wrote:
 > > ...
 > > Could a reason for this be that the postscript engine used in these 
 > > printers is so bad that people perfer to use ghostscript instead?
 > 
 > That can sometimes be an issue, but my experience has been that
 > the non-Adobe PS interpreters tend to be very good and typically only
 > run into problems with certain fonts.
 > 
 > > It looks like that fewer and fewer printer manufacturers license
 > > the Adobe Type Engine any more but use a cheaper one to reduce
 > > the number on the price tag.
 > > I had it happen to me more than once that a postscript engine of
 > > a printer barfed on me while ghostscript was still able to produce
 > > a decend output of the document in the printer's own language.
 > 
 > and I'd bet it was a TrueType font that caused the printer to run
 > out of memory and abort...

I haven't investigated so I'm not sure if it was a font that 
caused the problem - but it may well be that the cases I've 
seen were out of memory problems.
Especially older printer models seem to suffer from this.

 > 
 > In any case, using the Ghostscript pswrite device is almost certainly
 > not the right thing to do, as you'll lose all of the printer-specific
 > command stuff and introduce other rendering artifacts.  Instead, one
 > of the many PCL drivers (the PCL 6/XL driver if the printer supports
 > it) should be used instead, as the output quality is better and will
 > print faster.
 > 

Yes, I think that's what's happens most of the times. If the printer's 
natural language is PCL using the ghostscript PCL backend seems to be 
a good option and I don't agree with Kurt here.
>From my limited experience with page description languages I don't
know if converting from one language to another can produce artefacts.
However using pswrite seems to be clearly the wrong thing to do.


Cheers,
	Egbert.

PS:
Little off topic (we have gotten off topic a while ago ;-)) 
On the ride from OSDL back to the hotel Till and I briefly discussed 
that it would be good if it was possible to pass the ghostscript 
command line options to ghostscript in the postscript file instead 
of adding them on the command line.
>From the ppd point of view this seems to be what was intended by 
ppds. Yet we both did not know if (and how) this was possible 
in ghostscript.
On the other hand it also would be nice if cups based GUI printer dialogs
would offer a 'generic postscript printer' so that one could generate 
plain postscript for printing to a file.




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