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All software sucks, but, damn, printing software manages to bring suck to whole new levels. Even setting aside Windows, where you have half a billion printer definition files (misnamed as "drivers") which make printers that are almost perfectly compatible from UNIX (because they all implement standard Postscript, so long as the generator doesn't try and get too agressive with corner cases) behave entirely and bizarrely differently. In UNIX, we have BSD printing with its hardcoded definitions for printers and printing technologies that haven't been used in 20 years except among retrocomputing enthusiasts who trade SMD hard drives for Varian paper rolls at swap meets. We have System V printing, which is a moderately nice generic queing system with a bunch of horrible shell-scripts duct-taped to the side to handle the actual printing bit. We have a handful of "improved" print systems that couldn't settle on a communication protocol to save their lives. We have commercial print systems from companies like Adobe that bring the Windows Horror into the UNIX world... It's a measure of the horrible state of printing that the creaky old BSD LPR/LPD system has probably the least suckage of the lot of them. By a whisker. And let's not forget Apple, which used to be all "everything's Postscript, we'll take care of it", but now according to the log files it's using CUPS and running a webserver as part of the scheme...
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