Send PostScript, done. Today it's figured out what driver will properly rasterize exotic things like ligatures because we decided that throwing a real CPU in the printer was a mistake.
Unless you were using anything from that tiny obscure Hewlett Packard operation and didn’t want to shell out for a module. HP never promoted Postscript. It was far from universal as an embedded PDL.
> that throwing a real CPU in the printer was a mistake.
The CPU in any decently modern printer is still many times more powerful than what was in an original LaserWriter (30ppm and up needs power, even if it’s simple transforms and not running wankery). It’s not just about CPU power and modern laser printers still support PDL and vector languages like PCL and PDF (and many have some half assed often buggy PS “compatibility” eg BRScript), the bigger mistake is using general purpose Turing tarpit that is “powerful” rather than a true high level built for purpose PDL. PostScript just isn’t very good and was always a hack.
> Send PostScript, done.
The other problem of course being that raw PostScript as a target for most applications is not at all elegant and ironically too low level. So even if you wanted postscript, an OS that didn’t provide something more useful to most applications was missing core functionality.
The jwz quote about regexes applies just as well.
> Unless you were using anything from that tiny obscure Hewlett Packard operation and didn’t want to shell out for a module. HP never promoted Postscript. It was far from universal as an embedded PDL.
it's why HP had a series of printers marketed explicitly for Macintosh use, whose difference from the otherwise same model was that PostScript interpreter module was included as standard, as Mac didn't really support non-postscript printers with anything resembling usability
There was a time when the fastest 68k processor Apple shipped was in the LaserWriter (12MHz instead of 8Mhz in the Mac).
I seem to recall a story of someone internal to Apple figuring out how to run a compiler or other batch processing system on the LaserWriter as a faster quasi-coprocessor attached to a Mac.
I remember that time. I was taking a graduate level intro to graphics class and we had an assignment to write a ray-tracer and turn in a printout of the final image along with a printout of the source code. The instructor allowed any programming language, so I used a different one for each assignment.
For the ray tracing assignment I used postscript, the PS image operator calls a function to return each sample in the image. The transform matrix made scaling the image easy.
My code was two pages long, up from one page because of the many comments. I think the next shortest was 15 pages. It also ran faster than most others because of the faster processor.
Don Lancaster (outside of Apple) did that. In fact, he ignored the Mac and connected a LaserWriter directly to his Apple II, and programmed in straight PostScript. Used that language the rest of his life. All the PDFs on his site were hand-crafted.
Oh I knew that was coming. This interesting but ancient piece of trivia just illustrates something about how slow micros were back then. It’s not like printer don’t have more and multiple CPUs today. Not like whatever poorly written outsourced to India “managed” shit and other features are going to run on a potato. Whatever is driving the color touch LCD on even the Walmart econoshit is many times more powerful then that 12 MHz 68k.
Still have no idea what the GPs point was. You can just as easily run a raster on the host, if it has bugs it has bugs, where it lives doesn’t matter.
Further rosetinting is of course that LaserWriter was $20k and it’d be a decade plus before a monochrome dropped under 1. I’m gonna guess the Canon with the shitty drivers is 10x cheaper and faster.
It really isn't that much though. A 1200x1200 DPI monochrome image on Letter size (not even considering margins) paper is on the order of 16 MiB uncompressed. And bitmaps of text and line art compress down heavily (and you can use a bitmap atlas or prerendered bitmap font technique as well).
It’s also usually easier to upgrade RAM in a printer than a crappy firmware.
> most printers still render fonts and such internally.
Many printers have some scalable font rendering capability, but it is often not usable in practice for high fidelity. You absolutely can raster on the host to either a bitmap font, or make use of the PDL's native compression. Most lower end printers (which is pretty much the bulk of what is sold) do not have the capability to render arbitrary TrueType fonts, for instance. A consumer/SOHO level Canon laser using UFRII is going to rely on the host for rastering arbitrary fonts.
I have a modern Canon laser printer that does not properly implement ligatures because of obscure driver issues. What I see on the screen is not what is printed.
Text layout is hard and unfortunately drivers and firmware are often buggy (and as printing is lower and lower margin that doesn’t get better). But just throwing a weird language engine in doesn’t actually solve any of those problems.
Text layout doesn't need to be done when the source is a PDF. Make printers do the PDF and let Adobe control trademark access via conformity tests and life is good.
The biggest errors I’ve found are when the PDF says it’s using FontX or whatever, the printer claims to support the same version, and it’s subtly different.
The PDF tool assumes it doesn’t have to send the full font, and the document garbles. Print as image sometimes gets around this.
> Text layout doesn't need to be done when the source is a PDF.
PDF isn’t entirely a panacea, since it’s complex enough that printing any random PDF isn’t trivial at all, but sure, close enough, but before you were talking about Postscript.
> Make printers do the PDF and let Adobe control trademark access via conformity tests and life is good.
PDF printers aren’t all that uncommon. So why doesn’t your Canon do this? These aren’t technical issues at all. This is an economic/financial problem as mentioned (doing business with Adobe!). This isn’t about part cost, a CPU 100x more powerful than the one in the LaserWriter is nothing.
