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Comment by bborud | Hacker News Reader

Every time I need to print something on MacOS I am reminded of how much I hate printers and any printer related software. I've been messing around with computers for 40 years now and goddamnit, every decade printers become more of a pain in the neck.

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Funny how the whole FSF movement started in no small part because Stallman was irritated with the low quality of printer drivers... and how that movement for some (?) reason failed, in 40 years, to noticeably improve the quality of printer-related software.

But at least we got all the byproducts.

I wrote printer code for 10+ years. I appreciate how hard the technical problems are but vendors make it so much worse. I loathe printers. Printers peaked with the LaserJet III.

IIRC the Laserjet 4 had a much better warm-up time (and lower power consumption) by switching to a thin ceramic heating element rather than heating half the printer. But yeah anything after that is downhill.

do you mind lightly summarizing what technical problems make it more difficult? I'm assuming there are all sorts of things web-devs never even think about from that world.

Every printer vendor does things differently, every printer has different constraints and options? Too many standards?

Poor status, often a 1 line LCD says "processing..." and hangs infinitely.

Different handling of duplex, monitoring ink levels, file formats (PS? EPS? PNG? PCL? Which versions? Etc).

Issues with ink that expire by date, reduced functionality with 3rd party inks, not being able to print black even when only yellow is out of ink.

Different postscript versions and the nature of a language where CPU and memory use is unbounded means you get a nightmare of which files can print to which printers.

Most of our printer nightmares, at least the software issues, ended when we handled postscript -> PCL (a raster based format) on the server side.

Agreed, I ran several busy printers for a large department. The ljet IIIs were work houses and ran nearly forever if you used the recommended part replacement schedule.

We had a ljet III that outlasted ljet 4, ljet 5, and ljet 4000. Ljet 3 was the last with the HP print engine, afterwards they used Canon print engines.

The network interface was brittle, even a nmap would hang the printer. So we firewalled it off and used CUPS to handle postscript -> PCL. Sending only PCL to the printer (postscript memory and CPU is unbounded) made them faster and MUCH more reliable.

It would be helpful to understand exactly which layers in the stack you think of as technically difficult.

I feel like printers are far better now than they were 10 years ago. At least on MacOS and iOS, I have no problems finding a printer and printing. 10 years ago it was a pain, but now - smooth sailing for me. Heck, no driver installs either!

printing even works on linux now, thanks to stuff like Airprint and the support for it in CUPS

Yeah something like 10-15 years ago I thought for just the simple action of printing a file, it was way easier in Ubuntu than Windows, simply because they included a lot of drivers in the distro by default, while in Windows land I still had to visit the printer manufacturer's website for drivers -- or use the included CD! I try to avoid needing to do anything more complex than that. (Scanning I've always done with a USB stick plugged directly into the printer.) Things kind of got worse again in recent years with the removal of the standalone GUI for administration in favor of a web interface, and various ongoing modularization efforts, in theory cups3 will work even better and only support IPP/AirPrint: https://openprinting.github.io/current/#the-new-architecture...

Well, apart from printers added throug Bonjour constantly going missing and have to be re-added regularly, and (HP) printer drivers suddenly no longer working and being flagged as malware after OS upgrades.

Setting up an old RPi with CUPS helped a bit. For a while. Now I'm back to having to re-add printers to my mac workstation every time I want to print.

Just in: HP is adding AI into printer drivers (no joke: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/09/27/0030239/hp-is-a...)

You lose job control, but I've just done a netcat to a port on my printer with my document converted to PostScript and it works fine

pdf2ps <doc> - | nc <printer> 9001

I used to have a dot-matrix printer from the 80s. I could print with "cat file.txt >/dev/lpt0". It was amazing.

Didn't do Unicode unfortunately, and monospace only, and no bold and stuff like that.

But still the best printer I've ever owned.

Do you remember those portable sh-coded HP JetAdmin printer drivers? Are you saying things today are worse than that?

Heh, I've heard complaints about multi GB driver installs on windows, sounds worse to me.

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