Fast personal printing _without_ CUPS

[Chuck Swiger]

On Oct 27, 2011, at 10:39 AM, Jerry wrote:
> Printing under MS Windows is a breeze. The *nix community has never
> gotten printing up to that lever.

Of course Unix has had functional printing; the issue is mostly dumb printers which can't accept PostScript or at least PCL, and need an OS-specific driver to rasterize for the device.  A secondary problem is X11's imaging model with the dichotomy between on-screen imaging and print imaging.

For examples of Unix printing done right, look back to NEXTSTEP twenty years ago, using Display Postscript and Pantone colorimetry to provide true WYSIWYG; also, Sun's NEWS and OpenWindows also had the DPS extension to X.  Most of that technology is still around under MacOS X, although DPS has largely been replaced by a PDF imaging model instead.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck