Re: An Idea...

[zucchi zedzone mmc com au (NotZed)]

> > 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...

Ahh, I guess I stand corrected.

> > 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?

gnome-print is pretty new.  I think this is how he's solved the printing
problem in the past?

> > 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?

Check out http://zedzone.mmc.com.au/~zucchi/printing.html

Yes, they are both anti-aliased.  Sure, one uses metafont fonts, but
you can plainly see that ghostscript's renderer is pretty awful
(and that xdvi's is very nice!).

> 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.

We are not writing a postscript interpreter.  We are writing a printing
system!  We already have the rasteriser, we just have to bolt
on some dithering and control code stuff.

> 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.

Well as soon as we have to write one, most of the others are 'cheap'.
And writing one isn't very hard.

> > 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?

Resources?  We've seen a few times already its easier just to start
from scratch.

Look at those pictures again, do you really want that as state of
the art unix printing?

 Michael