Duplex printer advice

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Wojciech Puchar
> Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 1:06 AM
> To: Warren Block
> Cc: FreeBSD Questions
> Subject: RE: Duplex printer advice
> 
> 
> > This depends a lot on your print jobs.  Low quality machine-generated 
> > PostScript output can be slow.  PCL can also be slow.  The only 
> way to really 
> > know is to benchmark with your print jobs.
> 
> there was no case i found postscript to print faster.
> 

You won't on an HP printer, at least not an older one.  Remember
that HP had to pay a very hefty fee to Adobe for licensing
PostScript for each printer.  HP did everything possible to push
PCL and discourage customers from selecting PS because they 
did not want to continue to have to pay Adobe.  HP did not
dare mess with the PostScript implementation itself for fear
of a lawsuit - every HP printer that went out the door they
definitely made sure was completely compliant with PostScript -
but they did everything else to discourage it.  They told all
the companies that wrote tutorials to minimize PostScript and
enhance PCL, they make PostScript models much more expensive,
they didn't ship models with Postscript with enough ram to
run the PostScript interpreter reasonably quickly, and they
made no effort to speed up the PostScript implementation. Still
another trick was distributing PPD files that didn't have a
complete definition of all printer accessories so that when
you printed PostScript from, for example, Windows, you might
not have a duplexer definition and could only print duplex
on PCL.

Ted