Printing questions

[Jeffrey Watts]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Sam Clippinger wrote:

> I respectfully disagree with this assessment.  By that logic, any
> machine with the little "Designed for Windows NT" sticker on it
> shouldn't run Linux.  But they do.

You are misquoting me.  I'm talking about _printers_, nothing else.

I'm giving a general guideline when dealing with printers.  If it doesn't
state MS-DOS (especially when it says only through windows) or MacOS
compatibility, it is most likely a winprinter.

Remember, real printers are smart devices -- they should work with any
computer (within reason).  Winprinters lack imaging hardware and require a
software driver to do it.

> AFAIK, in order to create a "WinProduct", you have to make a
> peripheral that converses with its driver via an unpublished
> interface/language, then only produce drivers for it that run in
> Windows.  To the best of my knowledge, HP cannot do this.  They have
> very carefully crafted an interface language called PCL (Printer
> Control Language) that they use to control their printers.

You fail to understand the situation.  Winprinters cannot speak PCL
natively.  Their software driver is the only thing that can speak PCL
(which is a pretty crappy language anyway -- go PostScript!).

[ ... rest deleted ... ]

Jeffrey.

o-----------------------------------o
| Jeffrey Watts                     |
| watts at jayhawks.net            o-------------------------------------o
| Systems Programmer            | "If we can hit that bullseye, the   |
| Sprint - Systems Management   |  rest of the dominos will fall like |
o-------------------------------|  a house of cards... checkmate."    |
                                |  -- Zap Branigan                    |
                                o-------------------------------------o