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Printer Drivers | 44 comments (44 topical) | Post A Comment
Use Postscript...[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#8)
by Anonymous User on Tue May 13, 2003 at 01:22:01 PM PDT

I have a very unsympathic answer to the problem: Postscript.

Generic Postscript drivers can drive old and new Postscript printers alike.  Of course, it's nice when the vendor has a customized Postscript driver (e.g. to use special features, or higher resolution), but custom drivers are not required.

Some vendors charge a premium for Postscript, but avoiding the printer driver upgrade nightmare makes it cost effective.  Of course, it makes even more sense to purchase from vendors who do not charge a Postscript premium.

And those ancient Postscript printers work perfectly well from Linux too.

Of course, none of this currently applies to cheap ink jet printers, but it should.  I cannot understand why vendors saddle themselves with different drivers for every model, instead of developing to a simple, common, Postscript driver.

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Re:Use Postscript[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#10)
by Anonymous User on Tue May 13, 2003 at 04:12:32 PM PDT

It can apply to cheap ink jets. Look at Ghostscript. It runs on every platform known to man, and can print postscript to even the cheapest ink-jets.

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postscripot?[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#13)
by kuma on Wed May 14, 2003 at 11:10:56 AM PDT

funny, one of the most diffecult things to keep up with was the version change in postscript world as they upgraded the drivers. nec, lexmark, hp, epson all tried and failed to give us drivers that kept working as level 1 ps went to level 2 and then to whatever. the printers were expensive, so were the "custom" drivers" and so was the support. many users were so releived when they found they could use the setup features of their new ps printers to cause them to become laserjets. universal postscript drivers confused windows as it never was sure which universe they came from. postscript used by the knowledgeable is great, for us clods, just another postscript.

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Printer Drivers | 44 comments (44 topical) | Post A Comment
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