Wirt Atmar writes:

>The problem with PostScript is that not only is it slower than ASCII/PCL,
>people who use PostScript tend to want much better output quality than you
>would normally expect from a 100-150ppm printer, thus PostScript printers
>will
>probably always be doomed to be under 30-50ppm.

Not so -- in fact, it hasn't been this way for a while. Kodak produced a
60ppm PostScript printer around 1990-1992, and today, Xerox has a
180page/minute 300dpi PostScript printer, as well as a 135ppm 600dpi
PostScript printer. To see this product line, visit

 < http://www.xerox.com/xps/products/dpnps/index.htm >

-- they have some impressive printers. (My enthusiasm for these printers
is somewhat tempered by the knowledge that I've probably seen their work
in my water bill, my electric bill, my property tax bill, my gas bill,
and a fair amount of the junk mail I receive that's been personalized
with some anagram on "Bruce Toback".)

Granted that these printers can't keep up their speed when fed with very
complex PostScript jobs. But that's not what they're used for, and
besides, PCL 6, in a rather interesting capitulation to the PostScript
way of doing things, offers equally rich opportunities for bogging down a
high-speed printers. PCL 6 looks very much like PostScript Level 2 with
binary encoding. (If you spot it in a spoolfile, it's completely
unintelligible -- unlike PCL 5 and below, which a human has a chance of
understanding. Look for the PJL header that says ENTER LANGUAGE PCL XL (I
think) to see if that's what you're looking at.)

Superficially, PCL 6 just combines the capabilites of PCL 5 and HPGL/2
into a single unified binary encoding. But PCL 6 also includes expression
evaluation, an object-oriented execution stack, a mutable coordinate
transformation matrix, and many other PostScript features.

-- Bruce


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