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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I remember something similar where something would go wrong with lpr, and printing a PostScript document would instead print the (really long) textual PostScript source code.

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lol I remember those days. It's amazing how much PostScript is required to render a few pages of text. I remember one print job I sent that used about 200 pieces of paper after it printed the actual PostScript source instead of parsing and rendering it for some reason.

What became of all that paper?

Well, when just rendering text the text and the postscript for it can correspond pretty much one-to-one. On the other hand, if you start to include the necessary fonts it quickly becomes big.

PostScript, as a concatenative programming language, can be used to write very efficient code. By efficient I mean terse: doing much with very few code. However, it's usually autogenerated, so most ps code is long and ugly (but, obviously, good enough for it's purpose).

Yes I think that, despite the humorous reaction in the movie, The Office, that simply printing something like PC LOAD LETTER was a vast improvement over the post script dump that would happen when an error occurred.

Still happens with a variety of operating systems, usually when there's an extra driver or somesuch in between the PostScript code and the printer itself that inadvertently interprets that code as plain text to be printed as such.

Similar thing happens with ZPL/EPL printers as well; I've troubleshot many a workstation where someone expected a shipping label and instead got a long string of "^XA^PW812 [...] ^XZ" across dozens of labels.

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