Re: Solution to Printing Problems (non-PCL, USB, etc.)

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from James Woolley  on Thu, 09
Dec 2004 10:05:41 -0500


>> I can't fathom the need for
>> PrintFile. Without Postscript, PrintFile won't do anything more than
>> handle an
>> unformatted file, which is pointless.

> *If* PrintFile did not do anything more than handle an unformatted file, it
> *would be* pointless, yes. But if you have a XyDOS or Nota Bene printer
> driver for your printer, you load that and print to disk, creating a
> temporary file with printer commands embedded, e.g., FO.TMP. PrintFile will
> take that file and write it to your printer, much as we used to be able to
> give a command like COPY FO.TMP LPT1: in the MS-DOS days of yore. The
> output is as formatted as your printer driver permits you to make it, so
> those who are happy with their current printer drivers may want to try this
> method.

OK, you have a printer driver that you like, either PCL or PS (your only
choices). It outputs code formatted for one of those two languages. If you
have a PCL or PS printer, you just print to it from XyWrite directly. I
suppose if you had a USB printer that understood PCL or PS, and for some reason
you couldn't remap the port to one that XyWrite recognizes, this could be
useful (do printers like that even exist? I don't know). I thought we were
talking about non-PCL printers, WinPrinters, the cheap printers that come with
computer packages, or that require Windows software to work, etc. My
impression was that those are the printers people are having trouble with.
Those printers only understand raster bitmaps. They will never understand the
output of any XyWrite PRN until that output is further interpreted and
rasterized -- a task that PrintFile doesn't perform. For that you need a PS
interpreter like Ghostscript. And if you use Ghostscript, you don't need
PrintFile. Looking again at his pages now, Mendelson appears to require
Ghostscript. But he also uses PrintFile, and that's what I don't understand:
it isn't necessary, because every job (AFAIK) that PrintFile performs,
Ghostscript performs too.

What am I missing here? (Something, evidently. I confess, I don't print much,
and consequently only have one non-laser printer, a cheap piece of Epson color
junk.)

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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