LaserJet and Postscript

Factual Questions
1

“Hey, Network Administrator, what’s up with that old LaserJet IIP Plus in the junk pile?”

“It’s broken and it costs more to fix than it’s worth. You can take a look at it and see if you can fix it because we’re just going to throw it out eventually.”

So, I take it back to my desk and test it. Yep, gray crap all over the sheet. Obviously a dirty roller. As the roller is part of the toner cartridge, thus replaced when a new cartridge is installed, there’s no harm in trying to clean it. Nope, it just gets dirty again and there’s toner all over my desk and hands. The wiper, another part of the cartridge, is shot, too. Crappy non-OEM cartridge! Too bad, 'cuz it feels full. Hmm, the test shows only 1521 sheets have passed through this printer. It’s fifteen years old but is practically brand new.

NA sees the crappy prints and the mess on my desk and says, “Can’t fix it, huh?”

“I’ll take it home and see what I can do. I’ll get yelled at if I keep messing up my desk like this. But what happens if I can’t fix it?”

“It’s ancient and only does 300dpi at four pages per minute. I won’t miss it. I’d like to replace ALL of the printers in this building.”

[admission]
I’m evil and the wheels began to turn.
[/admission]

A visit to Officemax.com shows that a new HP cartridge costs about $100, but on eBay they’re a tenth that. Placed my bid, paid the bid plus postage, and the cartridge arrived yesterday. I plug it in and the printer works perfectly. I test it by printing a novel from Project Gutenberg in itty-bitty type and it was done in about fifteen minutes. Maybe not good enough for a business but fine for at home. I start feeling guilty but notice that the inventory tag has already been removed. He wasn’t kidding about not wanting to see it again.

So I can upgrade the memory from its current paltry 512k for five bucks and there’s a Postscript cartridge on eBay for another five. I assume that I will want the RAM upgrade if I print graphics but is there any advantage to printing in Postscript in this day of Truetype fonts?

2

Try looking at this for a description of printer languages. Don’t SDMB-dot my page!

Depending on the printer speed vs. your computer speed, it can be a lot faster to print in PostScript. You send instructions to the printer instead of a big bitmap. If you’re connecting by parallel then there’s definitely an advantage for speed. Some programs – particularly Adobe programs – offer special features when using PostScript.

3

Thanks for the link, but what do you mean by that?

4

It is a play on “Slashdot,” a large geek news site. Sites the get mentioned on Slashdot usually get swamped in short order - Slashdotted.

5

Thanks!

Okay, but is Postscript obsolete? I can see the advantages of having the microprocessor in the printer do the work if I’m feeding it via an 8086, but will it suffer needlessly if my 450mHz PII dumps most of its work on the poor little 10mHz 68000? Or is data transfer through a parallel port slow enough that simple data and the internal processor will be faster?

I suppose my point is that the more I research this the less I think I need Postscript. Well, I never NEEDED it, but the “cool” aspects are starting to pale, even for five bucks. Especially if I need Adobe Type Manager to see them onscreen.

6

Postscript is most definitely NOT obsolete. The better printers use it, and it is the basis of the PDF format. There is a lot of difference between dumping a postscript file on the printer and letting it do what it does, and your PC sitting there pumping data at the printer to make it print each individual dot.

Imagine your page as a bit map:
(300 dpi8.5inches)(300dpi*11inches)=8415000 dots to be transmitted. At a byte each, thats over 8 megabytes. If all you are printing is a dot in the middle of the page, then that is a lot of overhead.
Yes, GDI printers optimize a lot, so it isn’t that bad. Still, though, you’ve got your PC tied up thinking up and compressing dots when it could be doing something else.

In postscript, you just send a little piece of text that (in effect) says “put a dot in the middle of the page.” Maybe a couple of hundred bytes, what with headers and stuff.

All of this is irrelevant, anyways. If you can use a printer, and you can get one for an investment of $5 that will do what you need, then go for it. The considerations of processing power and postscript versus GDI really only come into play when you go to buying a new printer and you need to get the best bang for your buck.

If it works with your PC, and does what you need, and it works, then $5 is a good deal - and it doesn’t make a rat’s ass bit of difference that it is a Postscript printer.

7

Forgot to mention:
You usually also have the option (in the printer driver under Windows) to print everything graphically, in effect taking the load back off of the printer and putting it on your PC. That gets you out of worrying about how things will look, and you don’t need to worry about how much memory the printer has. If it has to do the rasterizing itself, then it takes more memory to do a complex page - and if it is too complex, the printer may barf. If you take that job back into the PC, then you’ve got as much memory as your PC plus your pagefile for the rasterization process. The data are still sent in Postsript, but as a sequence of short, simple commands that the printer can handle better.

8

I picked up a IIIp a few months ago, spent $60 or so on parts to rebuild it. It’s just about the same as the IIp. Great printers–built to live forever.

I had the (HP) PostScript cart on mine, and I tried it with and without. With the PostScript cart, this printer was a dog. It’s comparable to any inkjet without the cart.

Your IIp already has a nice native printer language: PCL4. It’ll do about everything that PostScript will do for you, and it seems to be better supported than PostScript on these printers.

The only nice thing about the PostScript cart is that it allows you to print from old Macintoshes. If you don’t have a Mac, you don’t need or want PostScript.

9

I’ll clarify P. Nym’s comments.

First, Windows supports PostScript out of the box. It’s most certainly not a “Mac-only” language, and in fact pre-dates the Mac by several years. It is/was the Unix standard before CUPS came around.

PostScript won’t hurt you. It can help you, depending on the nature of your printing and if you ever do proof work.

I’ll say that I don’t have a PostScript printer, because I don’t need one usually. In the event I do, I can print with Ghostscript which interprets PostScript.

In any case, I’m just pointing out that PostScript isn’t a waste; just misunderstood.

10

Nice to get all views! I’m still torn, of course, but since I still use Wordstar Postscript ability might be a nice add, especially for the money. I can always put it back on eBay, after all.

11

Thanks for your comments. I didn’t mean to dump on PostScript; it’s a fine language. I just don’t think it’s much better than the LaserJet’s native language.

I also think that the older LaserJets can interpret native PCL much faster than they can interpret PostScript. The printer seems to really drag with HP’s brand of PostScript cartridge installed. There were some third-party PostScript carts out there, maybe these are quicker.

By the time the LaserJet 4 was out, HP’s PostScript was just as fast as PCL… but that’s beyond the scope of the OP.

If your computer supports both languages–which is very likely–I still think PCL is the way to go with this particular printer.