Linux Printing: Still Awful After All These Years

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Thu Mar 27 14:12:18 UTC 2008


On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 07:28:54PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> I once had a Laserjet IIP (which I would put in the category of
> indestructible... almost).
> 
> In my pre-Linux days I had purchased an add-on cartridge, called Pacific
> Page, which plugged in where font carts went but actually added a
> postscript interpreter (HP also made one). The unit I bought was part of
> a kit that boosted the printer's RAM as well. It was slow but worked
> very reliably, especially with TeX ('dvips' was always more advanced
> than the various "dvilj" mutations). The combo survived the transition
> to Linux without a hitch, but I eventually discovered that it was _far_
> faster to print by removing the printer cart and using ghostscript to
> drive the printer's native personality.
> 
> That was back when the main CPU was a Pentium 1. Now the overall system
> load is taxed even less. IIRC the IIP's processor was a Motorola 68000
> running at some single-digit MHz, and I would assume that the printer's
> cartridge interface (designed mainly for font collections) wasn't
> particularly fast, either.

HP's postscript has always been awful slow.  I have seen an HP printer
(large format) take 45 minutes to render a postscript file before
starting to print.  HP probably has the most underpowered printers made
in terms of their print engine rendering speed.  Of course HP thinks the
host should do a lot of the work and hence use PCL instead so what do
they care if postscript is slow.  Just because HP can't do it right,
doesn't mean postscript done by the printer isn't a better idea.

HP printers, while certainly not crap in most cases (except their cheap
printers), are highly overrated.  You can get far better elsewhere.

> I have no problem letting my computer's CPU do as much of the computing
> as possible, leaving the printer to the physical task of laying
> ink/toner on paper precisely, consistently, and inexpensively. Given the
> updates to Ghostscript over the years I'm glad I didn't have to do those
> as printer firmware upgrades.

Given the bugs in ghostscript over the years (it took me over a year to
get a fix to a bug that was two lines long, and obvious, and written by
a ghostscript developer into ghostscript), I would rather not have to
rely on it.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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