Rick Moen <r...@linuxmafia.com> wrote: > Quoting wirelessd...@gmail.com (wirelessd...@gmail.com): > >> Seeing all the rage against non-PS printing here recently, I’m >> wondering how PCL compares? Is it better/worse/equal to PostScript? Is >> there any reason to prefer one over the other? > > PCL printing is generally faster. In vague outline, it is less capable. > (Both printing languages are old enough that there have been multiple > versions, especially true of PCL.)
It's a very long time since I last looked at PCL, but I recall it was rather horrible to work with. As I mentioned earlier, you can do tricks in Postscript like redefining the showpage operator (typically by just adding the right code to the beginning of the file/stream) to automatically do something to every page. But in PCL you can't - you'd have to go through the file finding every page feed, and adding PCL code before each instance. PC is also (IIRC) resolution dependent, so you don't get the "write once, print on any printer" capability of PS. And it's full of non-printing characters (escape sequences, form feed, and so on) while PS is (IIRC) supposed to be "7bit channel safe" and contain only printable characters (though I think it can handle 'binary' files for machine generated code). It's hardly surprising that PCL is faster on any given hardware - it does a lot less as the code generator effectively has to do a lot of work that's done in the printer (or to be pedantic, the RIP*) with PS. As I say, it's a long time since I last looked at PCL, but IIRC you have to do graphics using resolution dependent co-ordinates - while with PS, you can use the default units of points (1/72nd of an inch) or it's trivial to rescale things and use any scale you want in your code. In fact, you can tell PS to apply an arbitrary transformation matrix to everything. All this ability means (potentially) a lot more processing - so it's bound to take longer on the same hardware. > The ideal printer is a networked model that does both. Indeed, especially to deal with the software written by vendors with a "nothing exists other than PCL" attitude - grrrrr. * Raster Image Processor - converts the input job into a raster to send to the print engine. They are mostly built into the printer, but in many high end systems can be a separate unit. One I've worked with was basically a PC running Electronics For Imaging's proprietary RIP software and with an interface card for Canon's colour copiers - back in the days when such things were fairly new and very high end, and it was possible to spend more on the printer setup than it cost to buy some houses ! _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
