Re: not-even-newbie printer question

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Evans <peter@example.com> writes:

    Peter> Right-ho, so I need a PostScript printer.

No, no!  That was a joke!  (And an explanation why people buy them;
they're really not better than Ghostscript + any well-supported
printer for most purposes.)

Boot up your linux box and go "gs --help".  That will give a list of
supported drivers built in.  You can often rebuild ghostscript with
as-yet unsupported-by-Aladdin-or-your-distro drivers, too, but that
takes a bit of effort.

Epson printers are well-supported via the ESC/P protocol.  BubbleJets
are ubiquitous, and well-supported.  Many printers will do an HP
emulation (my workhorse TI microLaser, 1991-2000 RIP, started out as a
Postscript printer, but when TeX et al started generating Level 2 in
about 1996 I just switched it over to HP LJII mode and added
a Ghostscript filter -- completely transparent to the user ;-).

Me, I'm pretty happy with my HP LJ6 after a year, except that this
time of year pages and OHP film tend to stick together and come out in
clumps.  I bought my wife a cheap NEC inkjet for Christmas, she was
flabbergasted (she used to do CAD, so she was used to 16 color
plotters with micrometer precision on A0 -- ObDaveBarry I am not
making this up -- slow but beautiful) with the speed and very happy
with quality.  They do tend to smear, of course, so we buy good paper
for final copies.

Epson and NEC are popular around Tsukuba-dai with the less
well-heeled, going by the boxes delivered to the jimushitsu.  Those
with big budgets (and assistants to do the paperwork) go for FujiXerox
or Ricoh multipurpose network printer/fax/copier/sushiya combos.  No
desk space required -- but then there's no space for a desk.  ;-)

-- 
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