Printing software

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2003/08/27]

From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Printing software
Date: 20:04 on 27 Aug 2003
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...

Generated at 14:02 on 01 Jul 2004 by mariachi 0.52