To be fair, printing in 1995-6 was a huge can of worms and hell on earth.
Many printers in common use were still “one font wonders” and that resulted in lots of fun.
> that throwing a real CPU in the printer was a mistake.
The CPU in any decently modern printer is still many times more powerful than what was in an original LaserWriter (30ppm and up needs power, even if it’s simple transforms and not running wankery). It’s not just about CPU power and modern laser printers still support PDL and vector languages like PCL and PDF (and many have some half assed often buggy PS “compatibility” eg BRScript), the bigger mistake is using general purpose Turing tarpit that is “powerful” rather than a true high level built for purpose PDL. PostScript just isn’t very good and was always a hack.
> Send PostScript, done.
The other problem of course being that raw PostScript as a target for most applications is not at all elegant and ironically too low level. So even if you wanted postscript, an OS that didn’t provide something more useful to most applications was missing core functionality. The jwz quote about regexes applies just as well.
PDF isn’t entirely a panacea, since it’s complex enough that printing any random PDF isn’t trivial at all, but sure, close enough, but before you were talking about Postscript.
> Make printers do the PDF and let Adobe control trademark access via conformity tests and life is good.
PDF printers aren’t all that uncommon. So why doesn’t your Canon do this? These aren’t technical issues at all. This is an economic/financial problem as mentioned (doing business with Adobe!). This isn’t about part cost, a CPU 100x more powerful than the one in the LaserWriter is nothing.
The PDF tool assumes it doesn’t have to send the full font, and the document garbles. Print as image sometimes gets around this.
I seem to recall a story of someone internal to Apple figuring out how to run a compiler or other batch processing system on the LaserWriter as a faster quasi-coprocessor attached to a Mac.
Still have no idea what the GPs point was. You can just as easily run a raster on the host, if it has bugs it has bugs, where it lives doesn’t matter.
Further rosetinting is of course that LaserWriter was $20k and it’d be a decade plus before a monochrome dropped under 1. I’m gonna guess the Canon with the shitty drivers is 10x cheaper and faster.
> most printers still render fonts and such internally.
Many printers have some scalable font rendering capability, but it is often not usable in practice for high fidelity. You absolutely can raster on the host to either a bitmap font, or make use of the PDL's native compression. Most lower end printers (which is pretty much the bulk of what is sold) do not have the capability to render arbitrary TrueType fonts, for instance. A consumer/SOHO level Canon laser using UFRII is going to rely on the host for rastering arbitrary fonts.
For the ray tracing assignment I used postscript, the PS image operator calls a function to return each sample in the image. The transform matrix made scaling the image easy.
My code was two pages long, up from one page because of the many comments. I think the next shortest was 15 pages. It also ran faster than most others because of the faster processor.
it's why HP had a series of printers marketed explicitly for Macintosh use, whose difference from the otherwise same model was that PostScript interpreter module was included as standard, as Mac didn't really support non-postscript printers with anything resembling usability
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_printers
The earliest ones pre-dated PostScript by years.