Marc Wilson wrote:
On Tue, Dec 07, 2004 at 11:03:25AM +0300, Nikita V. Youshchenko wrote:
Tried ever to print non iso8859-1 characters from mozilla?
It isn't impossible without xprt, but it is really hacky ...
I will *freely* admit to my North American English bias. I will *also*
freely admit to my bias towards having a working ability to create usable
printed copies of the majority of web pages found today, which Mozilla can
usually do on its own and Xprint (either version) most certainly CAN NOT
without hackery that Joe User is not capable of and should not be expected
to be capable of.
Neither Mozilla nor firefox can print anything outside ASCII without
Xprint. Recently the builtin Postscript support of Mozilla improved but
the major problem still remains: Mozilla generates invalid postscript
which isn't accepted by more than 80% of the postscript printers out
there. Only highend printers and ghostscript can deal with it's junk. If
you look at the Tektronic Color Laser documentation (CD 1) you will even
see a notice that the Postscript code generated by Mozilla1.4 is not
supported by these printers - and guess what's listed as recommendation:
Xprint. Think about it: Mozilla's builtin Postscript support is THAT BAD
that Xerox added this extra note. Think about it.
Postscript exists for a *reason*... we don't need yet another
device-dependent and incompatible way to lay out a page.
I suggest to read the docs before running around and screaming.
Postscript is very limited compared to what the Xprint API can do.
Xprint offers a unified API to all existing print rendering models
available (PCL, Postscript, PDF, etc.) and even supports OpenGL.
Postscript can't even deal with alpha blending or proper gamma
correction - Xprint does - and even supports an emulation layer to
support these features with plain Postscript.
And no: Xprint is not device-specific, it's the driver in the Xprint
server which decides whether which method is being used. That's a huge
improvement over the very limited Postscript-centric CUPS model.
/David
