On 11.11-06:51, Girish Venkatachalam wrote: [ ... ] > Now I only know what you people seem to be saying about PPD files and > drivers. I have never used CUPS either. > > However long ago I have read that postscript is a PCL - printer command > language. > > And most printers these days support printing using postscript and the > LPD daemon which listens at TCP port 515 .
PCL is a printer control language. PS is a stack based programming language with graphics primitives for drawing. it may also be classed as a PDL (page description language). i would guess that you are assuming that "most printers" can process PS because "most" unix print services use ghostscript to process these files into a native printer langauge. in fact most printers cannot process PS because implementing a PS processor is quite expensive (requires significant processing and memory) compared to control protocols (like PCL), although PS has other advantages. this pre-processing is supported by cups and lpr but installation is generally simpler with cups (due to greater vendor attention). cups also has better integration with the new ghostscript processing structure, which allows more feedback from the print processor. this is particularly useful when using control languages (or host based raster processing) instead of PDLs. the lpr protocol also has some fundamental "issues" in it's design (much like FTP does). in short, i'd suggest you use, use cups unless you have a specific reason not to.
