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Re: A printer for a linux desk top.
On Sat, 24 Apr 1999, shaul wrote:
>What are the differences between a real Postscript and an emulated one ?
>Does someone has good / bad experience with any Lexmark printer ? I heard
>someone who says that Lexmark printers are not good in general, although he is
>surly not objective as he isa sales person for one of the competitors.
Postscript is a language and it requires a computer to run its interpreter
to get output from it. gs is such an interpreter, there are others. Every
'genuine' PostScript printer (by HP) has such a computer inside. This is
not a tiny microcontroller with 8k ram, it needs to have 2M to (+infinity)
RAM, floating point, and other things. Examine the size of gs and the kind
of CPU power it requires when running to understand this.
So, A PostScript printer must contain a whole computer, in addition to the
printer proper.
A PostScript emulation printer must also contain a whole computer. Unless
it uses your trusted PC for horsepower, a la winmodem, in which case the
PostScript emulator is a form of ghostscript living in the Windows
driver, and you buy a winprinter for more money.
Somehow I believe that the Lexmark thing is of the kind that emulates
PostScript in the memory, CPU, and disk of the host. And this, is very
likely a winprinter, and won't run under Linux. Not that I have anything
against Lexmark, they may be good at what they are doing.
>> Otherwise get something with PCL3 or PCL3 emulation, this works best with
>> gs afaik.
Note that I did not cut out this quote ;) You have a wide choice from
Citizen, Digital, Olivetti and others who support PCL2 and 3 perfectly.
BTW for $400 you can buy a better deskjet (color) which is also PCL2 or 3.
Peter
PS: OF COURSE if I'm wrong, and the Lexmark HAS a computer in it, and can
indeed do PostScript without sucking MIPS from L95, and it supports all
the fonts that you need, then it is a better choice. FYI I happen to know
that there are various troubles with downloadable fontsets for PostScript
printers (especially fonts not coming from the manufacturer) and that it
is possible to hang the printer (!) by sending it bad PostScript.