Re: An Idea...

[Wolfgang Sourdeau <wolfgang ultim net>]

On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, NotZed wrote:

> Still, i'm not sure they help much with non-postcript printers, which
> is the main problem.

Actually, the two ppd's in my gs distribution are for a Canon Bubblejet
printer, which I guess is not a postscript printer...

> Yes, it does.  It does it already.

So what are the complains of "having to code in postscript" coming from
? Why people don't simply use the functions provided by gnome-print
then?

> The big problem is that Ghostscript does a very poor job at rendering
> fonts.  Just try running 'gs' on just about any file and see just how
> poor the fonts are.

Actually I haven't seen any problem with font rendering at this time.
Maybe the problem is coming from the fonts themselves?
What if you try with gs -sDEVICE=x11alpha?

> It will be, but probably not for ghostscript (I already suggested this
> but Miguel does not like it, and now i see his point).  We can do
> a much better job than ghostscript, and i dont even think it will be
> that hard.

What I mean is that ghostscript *may be* on of the solutions used.
Personnally I think it does a wonderful job. Where I am reluctant with
it is the fact that ghostscript contains a bunch of drivers totally
unuseful. You can't select the installation of the only needed drivers
without recompiling it. For the rest, I think that if ghostscript is
still failing in some points after 10 years, it means that we'll have
trouble setting up our own postscript interpreters+printer drivers. So
the solution I see is still to enhance ghostscript with the feature it's
lacking.

> BTW supporting "MicroWeave(tm)" techonology is a cinch, all you do is tell
> the printer to use it, then send it raster data line by line
> (optionally run-length-encoded).  Nothing fancy at all to use it, if
> you dont tell it to use microweave you can even use an identical
> method to send it print data ...  I suspect econofast is similar; the
> smarts are in the printer, not the driver.

Exactly. Just to send a code such as "^]33\0x234..cryptic blahblah..".
But it doesn't mean we have to rewrite the printer driver from scratch.

> 
> Looking through the printer driver code for the epson stylus in gs -
> ugh it is a total nightmare, and the docs even say it is impossible to
> read.  (at least in 4.03, i dont know if it was cleaned up in 5.x
> ...), I really dont see why it is so complex.

So let's help them cleaning up their code?

> 
>  Michael
>
 
W
-- 
Les nombres imitent l'espace, qui est de nature si différente.
Pascal, Pensées