From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 20:04 on 27 Aug 2003 Subject: Printing software All software sucks, but, damn, printing software manages to bring suck to whole new levels. Even setting aside Windows, where you have half a billion printer definition files (misnamed as "drivers") which make printers that are almost perfectly compatible from UNIX (because they all implement standard Postscript, so long as the generator doesn't try and get too agressive with corner cases) behave entirely and bizarrely differently. In UNIX, we have BSD printing with its hardcoded definitions for printers and printing technologies that haven't been used in 20 years except among retrocomputing enthusiasts who trade SMD hard drives for Varian paper rolls at swap meets. We have System V printing, which is a moderately nice generic queing system with a bunch of horrible shell-scripts duct-taped to the side to handle the actual printing bit. We have a handful of "improved" print systems that couldn't settle on a communication protocol to save their lives. We have commercial print systems from companies like Adobe that bring the Windows Horror into the UNIX world... It's a measure of the horrible state of printing that the creaky old BSD LPR/LPD system has probably the least suckage of the lot of them. By a whisker. And let's not forget Apple, which used to be all "everything's Postscript, we'll take care of it", but now according to the log files it's using CUPS and running a webserver as part of the scheme...
From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ask_Bj=F8rn_Hansen?= Date: 04:15 on 28 Aug 2003 Subject: Re: Printing software On Wednesday, August 27, 2003, at 12:04 PM, Peter da Silva wrote: > And let's not forget Apple, which used to be all "everything's > Postscript, we'll take care of it", but now according to the log > files it's using CUPS and running a webserver as part of the > scheme... I hate to not hate it, but printing on OS X works really nicely. Or rather, it Just Works. Enable printer sharing on box with printer and the other computers on your friendly network will Just Print. I don't even remember configuring the powerbook to print over the network, the remote printer just showed up. Before I started using the powerbook when I went to the office I spent forever setting up printing again every time I had to print out new cover sheets for the TPS reports. (luckily not very often). - ask
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 11:43 on 28 Aug 2003 Subject: Re: Printing software > I hate to not hate it, but printing on OS X works really nicely. I haven't had an opportunity to hate it yet, it just seems aggressively overcomplicated so I'm practically twanging in anticipation of something breaking.
From: Chris Nandor Date: 15:12 on 28 Aug 2003 Subject: Re: Printing software At 05:43 -0500 2003.08.28, Peter da Silva wrote: >> I hate to not hate it, but printing on OS X works really nicely. > >I haven't had an opportunity to hate it yet, it just seems aggressively >overcomplicated so I'm practically twanging in anticipation of something >breaking. I've only once ever had problems with printing on Mac OS X (since they added the printer sharing in Jaguar), and that was when I first set up my network with Rendezvous and I had manually misconfigured the subnet mask for some of my machines. Apparently this was enough (at the time?) to screw up Rendezvous.
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