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Printing postscript files

  • 10-12-2002 3:10am
    #1
    CivilServant
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,005 ✭✭✭


    Has anyone printed high quality images and text from postscript files. I think these are adobe acrobat files, pdfs. I'm just testing my printer z52 against my ancient HP660C and the z52 wins hands down. But I was wondering if I should upgrade since I want to do a lot of printing with it and produce some high quality postscript images.

    I was looking for some comparisions on epinions to see whats good out there. Found some lasers, this HP Laserjet 1200 and it says in Printer / Language Simulation it's got postscript 2 capabilities. Then I look at my z52 and it doesn't have that feature. Can anyone with a postscript enabled printer or have some experience printing postscript files shed some light on this for me?


Comments

  • #2
    Kix
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,193 ✭✭✭Kix


    Well, for starters, postscript files and pdf files aren't the same thing (they're very closely related but we'll ignore that for the moment as it doesn't help us here :)).

    Postscript files (*.ps) are for sending directly to a Postscript enabled printer like your Laserjet.

    PDF files are intended as a portable document format and can be viewed in Adobe Acrobat Reader (which is freely downloadable from www.adobe.com if you don't already have it). Files being viewed in Acrobat can be printed to any printer (assuming that we're talking Windows here) - not only Postscript enabled ones.

    In fact, the full copy of Acrobat comes with a PS to PDF concevertor called Distiller so even if you have PS files you can first convert to PDF and then print those. You'll have to play around with the settings in Distiller to preserve the quality of the originals though.

    K


  • #3
    leeroybrown
    Closed Accounts Posts: 7,563 ✭✭✭leeroybrown


    There are two main ways a computer can spool a print job to a printer.

    1. Postscript: The document is sent to the printer in the form of postscript .

    2. PCL(5): The document is sent to the printer in a form call PCL (5 is the current version afaik)

    A lot of the modern laser printers use PCL by default. Regardless of the original format, all you need is a driver (containing filters) to spool the job properly and the quality will be the same.

    The main advantage of Postscript is that it's a commonly used format (especially under linux) and it can be spooled directly. Other than that theres no major difference.


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