The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's GuidePostScript PrintersOne reviewer mentioned that some of the new printers that are non-PostScript have some FreeBSD driver support, and I should mention this. Interestingly, another reviewer was completely the opposite and said that I wasn't emphasizing PostScript strongly enough. I have a rather strong view on this issue myself, especially after working for a company for 6 months that wrote training textbooks for Hewlett-Packard's printer division. Simply put, non-PostScript printers are an abomination and should be wiped off the face of the earth. The problem with PostScript is that Adobe copyrighted, trademarked, and patented it back in the early days and got a stranglehold on Apple over it. Several years later, when printer manufacturers began producing desktop publishing-quality printers, they were most unhappy at the prospect of paying Adobe $100 per printer to license a PostScript engine. Some manufacturers, like Epson, attempted to clone PostScript, which worked somewhat. Others like LexMark and HP decided to develop their own Printer Control Language (PCL). The result is that today all cheap printers don't have PostScript interpreters. The problem with all this is that only PostScript is standardized across printer manufacturers' devices. All the rest of them, like PCL, are just proprietary standards only supported by a single manufacturer. To get around this, printer manufacturers all write extensive drivers for - guess what - Windows operating systems, and little else. Frankly this is counterproductive. Manufacturers need to use a standard interface language between the printer and computer (PostScript) and only a single driver on the computer, and make all the printers conform. While I deplore Adobe attempting to extract as much as it can out of PostScript, I think this is one of those situations where doing it the Adobe way is the lesser of two evils.
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