Re: [tlug] Re: "Password on localhost" [C&C, maybe]

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-03-11 02:59 +0900 (Tue), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Why should printing be very hard? Unless you're just referring to the
> fact that there's no such thing as "printing to an Epson", let alone a
> concept of "printing" that that you can rely on. In that case, you can
> just class it with all the other I/O operations that the peripheral
> vendors refuse to standardize or document. But you mean something
> else, maybe?

Getting the data to the printer is decidedly non-trivial these days,
yes. But even beyond that, I think that the biggest issue is that you
have to deal with multiple different rendering engines, rendering
in different ways (e.g., some full-page, some not), and giving
you different amounts of information about what they are and what
their current status is, and try to get the darn things to produce
"equivalant" output.

In fact, it's a general problem amongst any systems, printer or not,
rendering in the area once known as "typesetting." Two examples not
involving printers:

    1. Opening the exact same OpenOffice Writer document on a Windows
    box and on my NetBSD box gives me documents with a different number
    of pages.

    2. Viewing the same web page in Linux Firefox versus NetBSD Firefox,
    both running on my NetBSD laptop and using the same X server, gives
    me quite noticably different textual output (different fonts,
    different formatting).

And neither OpenOffice nor xpdf (for which I've installed the
xpdf-japanese package) will display Japanese on my system, which even
there I can't be bothered to fix.

And let's not forget that there's a good deal of essential (as opposed
to accidental) complexity in a typesetting system itself; see the
sources to troff or TeX+LaTeX.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com