[1896] in Moira
Re: Towards Automatic Printer Driver Installation -- Printer Model Information
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Whitson)
Thu Nov 29 23:47:25 2001
To: Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@MIT.EDU>
Cc: "Danilo Almeida" <dalmeida@MIT.EDU>, moiradev@MIT.EDU
From: Mike Whitson <mwhitson@MIT.EDU>
Date: 29 Nov 2001 23:46:23 -0500
In-Reply-To: Garry Zacheiss's message of "Thu, 29 Nov 2001 21:34:25 -0500"
Message-ID: <n917ks8yig0.fsf@athyra.mit.edu>
I'm going to pipe up here.
There are occasionally some unpleasant interactions between data
generated by a Windows printer-specific driver and the printing
system. In particular, the Windows drivers sometimes assume that they
are driving the printer directly, and include PJL which attempts to
perform printer control operations. Since the print servers use PJL
to do their own control, having extraneous PJL in the job is sometimes
unfortunate.
Also, if someone generates printable copy for wide distribution using
a "print to file" operation, a printer-specific driver will be
unfortunate. (Try running a file with PJL garbage at the beginning
through a postscript viewer sometime.) Will users be clever enough to
switch to a more generic driver to generate printable files?
IMO, the only reason to use a printer-specific driver rather than a
generic Postscript driver in our environment is if the Windows machine
is going to be controlling the printer directly. However, the printer
won't even be in moira in most of those cases.
Everything Garry said about the feasability of the operation is true.
I simply question its utility.
-mike
