On 13/10/15 11:09, Johan Vromans wrote: > On Tue, 13 Oct 2015 10:39:35 +1100 > Andrew Bernard <andrew.bern...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> > Whatever page description >> > language your printer uses internally, the printer driver software on >> > your computer will convert your file to that language format and print >> > it. >> > [...] >> > Postscript itself is still highly relevant, PDF is essentially a >> > Postscript description, and lilypond can generate postscript, which is >> > rendered wth Ghostscript - a software RIP. > While this is true, one may not underestimate the role of the printer > driver or software RIP. PostScript is a full-fledged programming language > and a PostScript RIP must carefully implement all programming language > aspects in full. PDF (for printing) is a page description and hence easier > to implement and to process. As a reference, there are several PDF RIPs > (viewers) based on a number of PDF libraries, while there is only one > PostScript RIP. > > For this reason I switched to PDF several years ago, after having been > writing PostScript generating tools since 1985. For the end user, a > PostScript generating tool has a big and sometimes hard dependency: a good > software or hardware RIP.
And this is why I hate Postscript - just another indirection layer to screw things up :-) Bit after your timescale - mid-1990s, we had a Canon photocopier and FIRE rip unit, and when it went wrong it was a real pain. Once a document broke the ripper, I could never fix it and the only solution was to redo the document from scratch - I could never get it to print again :-( Cheers, Wol _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
