[SunRescue] What Gem did I find?

[rescue at sunhelp.org]

jon at jonworld.com writes:

>That stinks-- that's what 'winprinters' do today and those stink. I like
>printers that do postscript in the printer. *sigh* why can't *all* printers
>do that?

Historicly, because it took an expensive degree of "oompf" (no longer
an issue) and the licensing fees for Adobe were a little steep (no longer
an issue, given ghostscript (*are* there any GS based printers?)). I 
would assume the Adobe licensing fees have become much much cheaper 
anyways.

I have mixed feelings about PS on the printer. For most files, it's killer,
but for some things it's better to run postscript on your host and have
a dumb-frame-buffer style printer.

Any PS printer should be capable of that mode of operation though, so
yeah, all printers should be postscript. :-)

There's one trick I like to use for font manipulation that's illegal
in postscript, not for any technical reason, but for copyright fears
from the font houses (you *could* use this trick to copy raw font data
off a printer back to the host), but is legal under ghostscript.

-- david fischer -- dave at cca.org -- www.cca.org -- Cthulhu told me to. --