gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu (05/17/89)
/* Written 9:26 am May 12, 1989 by wtm@neoucom.UUCP in p.cs.uiuc.edu:comp.sys.amiga */ > Translating: In other words, it is the same old thing. We all > know how easy it is to write "a hardware interface that deals with > printer-specific communication". I guess I ought to be able to > knock that off with about ten minutes of coding :-). Like > translating a quickdraw raster to HP-PCL, for instance. At least > they are planning to give us hooks to do it right this time. Well, it's easy in principle. Most cheapo printers just want a bitmap dump. In today's printer drivers, you are fed streams of quickdraw commands (like "move", "lineto", "circle", etc), one stream per page. Normally you just pass these on to quickdraw to image the picture in memory, then dump it to the printer, voila. The laserwriter driver converts these quickdraw primitives to postscript primitives. Converters ALREADY exist for HP Laserjets. This imaging has always been fairly trivial, although some assinine programs like MS-Word 3.01 attempted to circumvent it, with disastrous results. The hard part is writing a mac I/O driver, and interfacing to the chooser, which has been kluged to h*ll over the years.