Printing Trends in Linux (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 20, 2007 22:49 UTC (Thu) by rlk (guest, #47505)
In reply to: Printing Trends in Linux (O'ReillyNet) by jwb
Parent article: Printing Trends in Linux (O'ReillyNet)

I'm not a fan of proprietary binary drivers myself, but I think it's a mistake to insist that all printers natively support PostScript, PDF, or what have you. Don't forget that PostScript and PDF had proprietary origins themselves.

For raster printers -- and all laser, dye sub, and ink jet printers are, when you get right down to it, raster printers -- there are tradeoffs between putting the driver on the host or in the same box as the printer itself. There's obviously the cost issue -- adding a separate controller, large amounts of memory (and inkjet printing at high resolutions uses a *lot* of memory), and firmware isn't free. But there are other advantages that are significant to the free source community to having the driver on the host -- it's possible to do more with it than simply providing 8-bit RGB or grayscale input. It's possible, for example, to have CMYK input, 16 bits/channel, improved screening algorithms, etc. Other people have used Gutenprint (I'm the project lead for Gutenprint) to handle non-standard inks and do other unusual things that the printer vendor didn't think of or doesn't want to support.

Personally, I find PPD files to be very limiting -- you can't express transfer curves, it's very hard to have conditional options, you can't even conveniently express floating point options without the CUPS 1.2 extensions. I'm not the only one who thinks that way -- at least some printer vendors have their own objections to PPD files for analogous reasons. At least, this was true at the last printing summit I attended about 18 months ago.

You can install Gutenprint, HPIJS, foo2zjs, etc. from source if you like. The issue of proprietary binaries is quite distinct from distribution independence.