re: Compatibility

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

Ted writes:

   Craig,

     Are you saying that Linux has only one driver, a postscript one,
   and gs is used to print the native PS output on other printers?

No, Linux doesn't have *any* printer drivers.  It has a spooler, lpr,
which saves files to a spool directory and squirts them as binary to
the printer port in the background.  You can configure various scripts
to call the necessary drivers as preprocessors.

   If so, that's not really the same meaning.

Um, as long as it's transparent, what do you care if the driver is
resident and takes up a 20kB DLL, or is a 1.4MB implementation of
Ghostscript and gets called when you do a print?  Sure, this takes a
bit of extra arranging, and uses a little bit more resources, but
what's wrong with that?  It's not clear to me what you want.

The point is that every program known to man and some known only to
women and gods produces Postscript output as an option.  That measn
that if you have Ghostscript you can print to any printer that
Ghostscript supports.  Which is one hell of a long list.  And don't
forget you can make any kind of file that PPM or JPEG supports.
Including GIF, TIFF, and fax.

IMHO
Steve