Debug Brother MFC-9560CDW failure to print

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 8 Feb 2012, Robert Bonomi wrote:
> Da Rock <freebsd-questions at herveybayaustralia.com.au> wrote:
>> On 02/08/12 17:24, Robert Bonomi wrote:
>
> Lawyers are not a problem -- the PS _language_ *IS* in the public domain.
> Anyboy is free to implement their own interpreter.  See -'ghostscript' for
> a _very_ well-known example. <grin>
>
> Many "lower-price" printer manufacturers use a 'private' implemention -- the
> Adobe License fee is (or at least used to be, a couplee of decades aoo, when
> I was dealing with such things) in the hundreds of dollars _per_unit_.

Even higher priced models.  HP uses a compatible version in many of 
their office printers.  It's very good.

> I haven't tested a current Brother implementation.  A couple of decades ago,
> their 'PS-level 2" implementation 'just worked' for anything I happened to
> throw at it in a production environment.
>
> Some of the 'alternative' implementations actually have -fewer- bugs in them
> than the genuine Adobe-licensed code does.  <wry grin>

Been a long time since I tried BRScript, but memory suggests it was 
adequate then, and will have improved since.  Machine-generated PS code 
generally doesn't try anything unusual, and should work fine.

The ability to print PDFs directly was added with PostScript 3.

Pretty much any printer with a PS interpreter will also accept PCL. 
Interpreting the PS on the host with ghostscript and then sending PCL 
bitmaps might be faster.  It depends on the document and the bandwidth 
to the printer.