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Comment by wbl | Hacker News Reader

I have a modern Canon laser printer that does not properly implement ligatures because of obscure driver issues. What I see on the screen is not what is printed.

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Text layout is hard and unfortunately drivers and firmware are often buggy (and as printing is lower and lower margin that doesn’t get better). But just throwing a weird language engine in doesn’t actually solve any of those problems.

Text layout doesn't need to be done when the source is a PDF. Make printers do the PDF and let Adobe control trademark access via conformity tests and life is good.

> Text layout doesn't need to be done when the source is a PDF.

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 biggest errors I’ve found are when the PDF says it’s using FontX or whatever, the printer claims to support the same version, and it’s subtly different.

The PDF tool assumes it doesn’t have to send the full font, and the document garbles. Print as image sometimes gets around this.

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