Re: Infoprint successor

There are PCL viewers also.

Are drivers are not needed for either.  Say you have an application that
spits out your print to a large PS or PCL file.

You can take that file to a PC.  Have a pritner attached via LPT1 with no
driver installed.

all you do is:
 copy /b myfile.prn lpt1

The pritner receives the binary file and processes the language and spits
out your print.  Print drivers are only an abstraction between a document
and the print language.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Rich" <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Midrange Systems Technical Discussion" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 4:47 PM
Subject: Re: Infoprint successor


> James Lundy wrote:
> > Which would you recommend: PS or PCL?
>
> I like postscript (ps) over pcl because postscript is not unique to
> printing (though printing is the most used application by far).  As a
> consequence, there are postscript viewers that display on the screen
> instead of requiring you to actually send the printer commands to a
> printer.  This really helps with testing.  Plus there are postscript to
> PDF and postscript to TIFF utilities available that make things nice for
> web and faxing.
>
> Adam mentioned that PCL is an HP and compatible language and that ps is
> more generic.  This is largely true, but postscript isn't necessarily
> vendor-influence free.  Postscript was developed by Adobe and therefore
> it's development follows Adobe's agenda.  However, current versions of
> postscript are standardized and the specs are readily available.
> Postscript is more cross platform than PCL:  it is used on Macs, unix,
> PC, and others.  PCL requires printer drivers for the specific printer
> to be installed on the host machine and those drivers are usually
> windows only.
>
> James Rich
>
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