On Wed, Oct 31, 2001 at 05:50:50PM -0800, Karsten M. Self wrote:
| I was having problems printing from my desktop -- Debian/Sid, lprng.
| Playing with my /etc/printcap, I found that a vastly simplified setup
| (no filters) appears to work, at least for postscript inputs, where the
| lpf filtered version doesn't.
I'm not familiar with lpf, and I don't work with printcaps at all (I
use CUPS), but I am familiar with several of HP's printers.
| The question remains, given that I've got an HPLJ4M, Postscript enabled,
| does the filter actually buy me anything?
That is a nice printer. In my experiences, every unix program outputs
either postscript or plain text. The printer you have certainly
handles postscript, and I'm fairly certain it has PCL (though I don't
know the version) too. The main differences bewteen PCL and PS are :
PCL PS
binary text
fast for raster good for vector
images images
made by HP made by Adobe
more compact more data to send
to the printer
There is no problems if you just have a basic printcap entry that does
no filtering -- your printer can interpret the PS just fine. If you
print images and stuff, though, you'll likely get a performance boost
if you use your computer to convert the PS to PCL. This is how CUPS
is handling my LJIIIp. I do notice a significant performance
difference when sending documents to be printed (even just text).
You can probably even send plain text documents straight to your
printer. With my printer I have it set to auto detect the language
the data is coming in as. It switches between PS and PCL
automatically. Many PS-only printers (ie Apple LaserWriters) can't
print plain text because they only know how to execute postscript
code. You may want a filter to take plain text and convert it to
PS/PCL but try it first -- it probably works fine.
HTH,
-D
