Is There Anything Special About a PostScript Laser Printer?

In a ridiculously simplified nutshell, Postscript printers support features and functions used by professional publishers.

Despite the age of your printers they still have some worth, although the Postscript version they support has long since been replaced by newer versions.

Hi!

Yes. PostScript printers are typically much more intelligent than your average laser or other type of printer. In its own right, PostScript is a very capable 'programming language' of sorts. It's also somewhat portable...that is to say that you can dump a PS file to a printer or other renderer and have it be printed or displayed.

Do your newer laser printers support PostScript? If they don't, I'd hang on to the best-equipped, fastest or most capable printer of the bunch. (As you've noted already, they don't differ much in terms of print engine features.) I am keeping a very well equipped LaserWriter 12/640 PS around for this very reason. Even though I own a much newer color laser that can do PostScript work (it's a Samsung CLP-550N) the Apple printer is *much* faster in terms of processing time.

Truthfully, you may never need a PostScript printer. However, my kind of luck dictates that the moment I didn't have one...I would then need one!

William

I still have an old Apple Laserwriter kicking around, the original huge heavy beast. I remember being surprised that the printer had the same CPU, at a faster clock rate no less, than the computer it came with. Must have cost a fortune in its day, I used that setup for most of my college homework. Wasn't so tempted to be distracted by playing games when all I had in front of me was an ancient B&W Mac but it worked great for word processing.

My hp laserjet 5M supports postscript, but I use it in PCL mode because PCL is much faster. I've never run into anything that wouldn't print correctly using PCL. Postscript requires the printer to do much more processing than PCL. This made a lot of sense back when computers had very limited processing power, but not any more for most users. Some software may only work with postscript, so it could be useful in those situations.

Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

Since Microsoft went to TrueType about ten years ago, and workstation clock speed passed 1Ghz, basically, no.

J.

The 'Net consense on this seems to be "let it go." I hope that whoever gets it/them will enjoy it/them.

Thanks to everyone for all the help.

------- Do your newer laser printers support PostScript? If they don't, I'd hang on to the best-equipped, fastest or most capable printer of the bunch.

-------

I've also got an Apple LaserWriter II NT and the identical HP IIP/IIIP. They use the HP 92295A toner cartridge. Both were scavenged from the trash. The HP, according to the previous owners when they left it out by the curb when moving out, worked perfectly. "Works perfectly" means that the fuser asembly didn't heat up at all, but that could have happened while they were moving it around. I put the fuser from the Apple in it. The Apple jams repeatedly, despite having several new parts in the paper path.

I can check the Apple website or elsewhere to see what the processor speed is on those. I have another PS printer here, a GCC BP Elite, something like that. I don't think it uses a Canon engine, but don't quote me on that. I've got a ScriptWriter 4-PS, which uses the HP type

74 cartridge. I can't recall what that corresponds to in the HP/Canon catalog. It runs on PCL and is supposed to work on both Mac and PC platforms. I can't get Windows to recognize it, though supposedly I have the correct driver installed. I have the owner's manual and the OEM software for it; the company that sold it went belly-up ages ago. It's too old to be plug-and-play. That could be a problem with the parallel connection. I gave up trying to figure it out, and I use it with a Mac.

I've got a printer in my car, under a chair, in the attic, at least two lying on their sides.... I really ought to get a life.

Kim Jong, wherever you are in the world, thanks very much for posting your question. I've been wondering about the same thing since I have in mind to buy one of the new color laser printers, perhaps an Okidata, and I couldn't figure out how best to frame the question. You asked it perfectly. Many thanks.

And thanks to the experts who replied. You probably saved me at least a hundred bucks, maybe more, for not having to buy a PostScript printer.

De nada, dude. Adobe is up to PostScript 3 now, and it is unlikely that my old printers could handle PS3 files. I assume that new PS printers could handle the latest software.

**wherever you are in the world** Northern Virginia. I maintain a HF and VHF listening post in the vicinity of the Pentagon. There, I monitor a variety of radio transmissions, including the comings and goings of Air Force 1 from Andrews AFB, and so forth.

Best wishes.

--snippage--

Yes; if you have a PostScript printer, *and an application that supports it* you can print using PostScript. Some folks consider that a significant advantage.

If you're picky about the way the pages of your documents look, PostScript is still the way to go. I'm not talking about how the letterforms print out; I'm talking about kerning, word spacing, the way flowed text looks, things like that (IOW, the look of the entire page). PostScript pages have a different "look" from the same pages printed out using "TrueType", and picky people generally prefer the way PS looks.

That's totally aside from PS's graphics and other capabilities, which are also very nice for some purposes.

And the old LaserWriter with the Canon engine is a keeper. Those things are the "tanks" of printer engines; they seem to last almost forever, if you feed them a few parts once in a while.

I have a LW IINTX that's been running fine for fifteen years, needing only a couple of toner cartridges and a paper feed roller.

Isaac

In message , Kim_Jong snipped-for-privacy@volcanomail.com writes

The RIP I have here for this printer/copier doesn't know about level 3, but that doesn't seem to be an issue, the printer driver happily prints to it, the printer driver has the option to output in level 3, but I'd need a newer RIP and it isn't worth it (well I did buy one off ebay, that I think would have done it, however Mr Postman managed to destroy it)

--
Timothy

| On 25 Feb 2006 12:00:57 -0800, Kim_Jong snipped-for-privacy@volcanomail.com wrote: | >Is There Anything Special About a PostScript Laser Printer? | | Since Microsoft went to TrueType about ten years ago, and workstation | clock speed passed 1Ghz, basically, no.

Postscript is still the `printing language of choice' for a *nix box, since most *nix applications still emit their printing output in postscript (for lack of a better standard.)

You can generally use ghostscript to parse the postscript and convert it to whatever your printer understands, but often this involveds sending bitmaps of each page to your printer which is generally a whole lot slower (and often doesn't look as good) as if you could just send the printer the postscript and let it parse it. The process is also relatively cpu intensive.

But for most users, no, it doesn't really matter anymore.

--
Doug McLaren, dougmc@frenzy.com
Communicating with aliens via the `fire' button

Hi!

I am not sure how much that matters for practical purposes. I've got a Mac mini (running Mac OS X 10.4.5) that prints to my LaserWriter 12/640 (see the other post I made, only on sci.electronics.repair) and it all works beautifully at PostScript level 2.

As a matter of fact, some of the printers I have at work that are much newer don't do as good a job of printing in PostScript. The printers at work are Sharp AR-505/507 and AR-450x machines and they make a habit of locking up or throwing PostScript errors concerning offending commands from some applications, especially Adobe Acrobat standard. Meanwhile the old 12/640 works *perfectly* with everything that troubles the Sharp machines.

William

It depends upon what and how you do it. Most *nix boxes print to networked printers. If you don't want to dedicate a computer to running a printer, HP and many others sell standalone print servers that have an ethernet port for incoming data and one or more parallel and or USB ports for printers. The protocol conversion is done by the printserver device, the actual data is expected to be in the format used by the printer.

For Windows machines this is simple, you can get drivers for networked printers for Windows '95 and up. Unix is slightly more complicated.

There is a wonderful open source, but poorly documented package called CUPS which runs under *nix. CUPS manages printers of all sorts on all types of connections. The reason for the documentation is simple, the company that gives away the program sells consulting services to support themselves.

For those that do not want to or cannot afford their services, there are several web sites that do document it well. Linuxprinting.org has good howtos which apply to more than Linux.

The main program behind CUPS is ghostscript. Ghostscript can convert Postscript files to almost anything's native output, I've even used it to print Postscript level 3 files on level 1 printers.

CUPS can print to anything your *nix system can support, so if you have the correct add ons, you can print to printers on Windows machines. MacOS X supports CUPS directly, you can print to CUPS printers or print to native printers on a Mac from CUPS.

OS9 and older is not as well supported by *nix, using netatalk you can print TO CUPS printers, but not AFIK from.

You also can send RAM (printer format) files using CUPS, and I've even used it to control an HPGL plotter. I think you can use it to convert HPGL to Postscript or PCL (HP's native language), but I've never tried

CUPS also networks well and can be set up to talk to other CUPS servers and exchange information.

As for loosing quality using ghostscript to RIP (raster image process) files, it mostly is a thing of the past. HP printers used to be limited in the resolution of PCL files, for example, they would accept 300dpi bit maps, but not any higher. They have since released an open source extension to ghsotscript that will produce PCL files at the highest resolution of the printer.

The main advantage I can see for a postscript printer is that it will generaly produce, within the limits of its resolution and fonts the same output as a postscript typesetter. People who produce documents destined for real publishing care about these things. People who just want to kill trees do not.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667  IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 

Howdy!

The IIP/IIIP uses a 92275A cartridge, and the II and 3 use the

92295A cartridge.

Drop the "P", and you're right about the commonality. With the "P", you'd have to be talking about the LaserWriter NTR instead ...

RwP

**The IIP/IIIP uses a 92275A cartridge, and the II and 3 use the 92295A cartridge. Drop the "P", and you're right about the commonality.**

Whoops. My mistake. What I have is an Apple LaserWriter II NT and an HP LaserJet series II.