Re: The Death of Carbon

"Tim Murray" <no-spam@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:Tzm9j.44214$K27.27484@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:31:11 -0500, Daniel Johnson wrote:

This was a big deal for DOS users.

In these more enlightened days, most everyone uses printers that can
render bitmaps, so there's less need for this stuff.

Actually if one assumes the cheap inkjet is on the most desks, then it is the
computer doing the RIP process, not the printer.

Even today, PCL printers are pretty common. Back then you had lots of impact printers of various sorts, and some of them could not render a bitmap *at all*. Think daisy-wheel.

Windows can print on those. No Mac ever could. Ancient history now, of course.

But GDI continues to
offer a first class experience for PCL printers, which is nice.

And you still must install a driver for the printer, whether Windows or Mac.
It is not GDI that's doing the printing. GDI describes it for the driver the
data is being fed to, whether PCL, PostScript, or whatever. And it is GDI
that (for example) pass through CMYK unless it's in an EPS wrapper. Yeah,
first-class experience.

Exactly. That means you take full advantage of your hardware. It's faster that way.

That's why when OS X prints to a PostScript printer, it generates PostScript to send to the printer, rather than rendering all that stuff itself.

You still don't get that on a Mac, even today.

Like, you would want to? But nonetheless, there is CUPS and drivers for PCL.
And CMYK, too.

Sure. But the OS X printing stack can only generate bitmaps or PostScript for the printer; you can wrap that bitmap up in PCL, but it's not ideal.

You *do* get rather nice PostScript support on the Mac today, which is
nice too. Classic Mac OS didn't have that, though Mac users often insisted
that it did. They confused application support for PostScript with the OS,
which (if you looked) offered less than Windows of the time.

Again, you are way wrong. Apple and Adobe brought PostScript to the desktop
world ... a few years before OS X, I believe... via the LaserWriter driver
and the similar but different Adobe driver.

Sure. But Windows had a PostScript driver too, and the Windows printing stack can do a better job with it since it can communicate the printer's capabilities and its font metrics back to the app.

What Mac OS did was print better than *DOS*. But that wasn't exactly hard.

.

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