Re: Need advice on Postscript/PCL printer
Nicola Bernardelli <nbern@iname.com> writes:
> The Lexmark Optra E312 (600x600dpi, 4Mbytes RAM, 10ppm, 3 years
> replacement-at-home warranty, relatively cheap toner cartridge [5000
> pages] with builtin photoconductor) claims "Postscript2+pcl6
> emulations".
>
> Could I just send to it the Postscript files produced with the tools
> commonly used in Linux?
My guess is "Yes", but I don't have any experience with Lexmark printers. I
can't imagine why there would be any problems, though.
> I guess a PCL-only printer would also do, maybe via Ghostscript as a
> translator, but what would it miss compared to a Postscript printer?
I don't think you'd miss much. Setting up a PCL printer is a bit more work (at
least until I discovered the apsfilter package), but you should be able to
print anything out on it. It may be slower, because (AFAIK - so don't quote me
on this) Ghostscript would print each page as a large bitmap. And complex
pages will be processed by your CPU instead of the printer, which may cause a
bit of problems on a high-load machine, but you probably don't have to worry
about that for normal text/music work.
I have a Brother HL-730, and I haven't had any problems with it. It took some
digging before I found out the right configuration to make it print at 600dpi,
though.
A general warning about printers: some claim to have PCL support, but only
support PCL through a Windows software driver. Some (like my HL-730) will
support PCL4 in hardware, and some higher level of PCL through software, which
is annoying because PCL4 only allows up to 300dpi.
HTH
Hubert
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