Announcing printerd

Posted May 24, 2012 9:00 UTC (Thu) by pkern (subscriber, #32883)
In reply to: Announcing printerd by nybble41
Parent article: Announcing printerd

You really want to drive network-attached printers with rasterized input as well. It has the computing power of a toaster, the only plus is that it can start printing when it completed the image of the first page.

PDF can have multiple layers and hence may overload a rasterizing printer easily. Even PCL XL is already too complex and certain outputs will cause the printer to take a walk.

The only part that worries me about printers that really only take raster input is the fact that you then need to bother with uploading their firmware and the newest and greatest proprietary inventions of rasterization on-the-wire formats to reverse engineer.

Announcing printerd

Posted May 24, 2012 18:35 UTC (Thu) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]

> the only plus is that it can start printing when it completed the image of the first page.

If there isn't any serious way to generate and stream a PDF document one page at a time, PDF would seem to be a uniquely unsuitable format for the printing of large documents not already composed and linearized in PDF format in any kind of a hurry. Perhaps SVG Print would be a better long term alternative for that reason alone.