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Pros and Cons of PDF print queues?Pros and Cons of PDF print queues?Posted May 22, 2012 18:34 UTC (Tue) by bredelings (subscriber, #53082)Parent article: Announcing printerd
I've been looking forward to PDF printing queues for a bit. My printer can print PDF, and PDF can express some things that PostScript cannot. So, hopefully this would allow those features to print directly, and remove some of the overhead of converting PDFs to PS before printing. All the articles I want to print are in PDF now, not PS.
As far as other formats, some current print queues already convert text to PS before printing. This is different than disallowing text -- text is still allowed, but it isn't sent directly to the printer. Whether the everything-is-a-PDF paradigm has enough benefits to offset the cost of converting all documents to PDF before printing is something I'm not completely sure about.
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Pros and Cons of PDF print queues? Posted May 22, 2012 19:01 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
What can PDF express that PS can not? On top of my head I'd say PDF Forms or embedded Flash, but how could you possibly get a printer to make sense of that?
Pros and Cons of PDF print queues? Posted May 22, 2012 19:15 UTC (Tue) by alexl (subscriber, #19068) [Link]
What about actual transparency (alpha channels), blending operations like "over", and transparency groups.
Also, the fact that its not a general programming language, so you can't write a raytracer in a PDF is kinda nice on the server side.
Also, I think there is some metadata storage in PDF so that you can tell the printer things about how to print the document, etc.
Pros and Cons of PDF print queues? Posted May 22, 2012 19:22 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]
The biggest items for me are:
- PDF can handle CJK and other large font sets without the hackish and painful workarounds required in PostSCript, which was designed assuming that an 8 bit character index was all you needed.
- PDF can handle alpha channel color. The PostScript work-around for the lack of alpha-channel support is to expand all the relevant areas into bitmaps with pre-merged colors rather than carrying forward overlapping vector-based elements with transparency. This works so poorly that I hesitate to even call it a work-around.
Pros and Cons of PDF print queues? Posted May 22, 2012 19:01 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
what is it that pdf can do that postscript cannot? I was under the impression that pdf was just a compressed and simplified postscript file.
the biggest overhead of converting between pdf and ps is the overhead of dealing with the compression.
Pros and Cons of PDF print queues? Posted May 22, 2012 20:17 UTC (Tue) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]
> I was under the impression that pdf was just a compressed and simplified postscript file.
You're mistaken.
The drawing commands in a PDF file are a (non-Turing-complete) subset of PostScript, though, so the mistake is understandable.
Pros and Cons of PDF print queues? Posted May 22, 2012 19:17 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
In order for PDF to perform the same function as PS then your printer system is going to have to have the ability to edit PDF files on the fly and insert printer-specific formatting.
Seems like a tall order.
I am guessing your 'PDF printer' really just uses some daemon already to convert the PDF to PS or some other control language that the printer understands. If it is a network printer then I suppose it runs a embedded CUPS daemon on Linux or some proprietary alternative to do the work.
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