[plug] Printer sharing Dodgy

[James Devenish]

In message <20030814104727.GA4453 at erdos.home>
on Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 06:47:27PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 06:25:22PM +0800, James Devenish wrote:
> | (I'm used to Macs and UNIX machines having a generic PostScript driver
> | whereas Windows application vendors apprently like to supply their
> | own, so that they can interfere with the already clunky operation of
> | your Windows computer).
> 
> Um.  An alternative view of this is that Windows doesn't cling to the
> relics of an outmoded over-engineered print system

That job was left to professional printers.

> and instead uses its own abstraction which happens to do a pretty
> decent job of displaying things in much the same way on the screen as
> on a piece of paper,

So you're saying it goes like this:

    Application ->
        abstraction layer ->
        PostScript print driver ->
        print protocol.

What I'm complaining about is the PostScript print driver part. I would
be happy if I could just get the PPD for the printer and copy that to a
Windows machine for it to be happy. But instead, the vendors want to
hide everything within their own closed solutions.

> even for documents using fonts other than Times or Helvetica. :)

:)