[lug] Post Script to PCL

[Ferdinand P. Schmid]

This brings up the old issue of color mixing on inkjet printers.  The
output from Ghostscript on my HP deskjet isn't great by any means because
the colors don't look good.  The HP windows printer driver does a pretty
good job with converting the output to PCL for this particular printer.
Epson sells a postscript interpreter+driver (RIP driver) for some of their
inkjets that works pretty well (they license Adobe's Postscript
interpreter).  Again - only for Windows.  Sometimes you are stuck with
printing postscript, e.g. when printing from graphics applications like
Quark Express.  Quark's PCL support is marginal at best.

So it would be time for some of the printer manufacturers to offer decent
Linux drivers so that Ghostscript can really shine or be replaced.  I am
assuming this quest for a PS2PCL converter is at least in part driven by
the search for better quality output on low end printers.

Ferdinand

Tkil wrote:

> PCL is a dumb dumb dumb page description language.  it can do pattern
> fills and maybe rules, and that's mostly it.  (PCL5+ might have added
> some things, but it's still a very far cry from PostScript.)
>
> so, if you need to convert PostScript to PCL, you *have* to use some
> sort of PostScript rasterizer -- of which Ghostscript is pretty high
> quality, easily available, and fairly well supported.
>
> on the other hand, if you have some other source format (e.g. LaTeX,
> *roff, SGML, etc), you might be able to find better conversions than
> taking a detour through PostScript first.
>
> so, if you only have PostScript, you're stuck with using some form of
> PostScript interpreter (and since the licenses from adobe are a couple
> hundred each, GhostScript is a pretty good deal.  :)  if you have some
> other source format, there might be more options available (e.g. DVI
> directly into PCL.)
>
> t.
>
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--
Ferdinand Schmid
Architectural Energy Corporation
http://www.archenergy.com
(303) 444-4149