patwood@unirot.UUCP (Patrick Wood) (04/30/87)
Hewlett-Packard said it will add PostScript compatibility to its line of laser printers. "We repeatedly tried telling people why they may not need it, but we found that approach wanting," said Steve Simpson, marketing manager of H-P's office printers, yesterday at an H-P seminar on desktop publishing in New York. H-P will probably not support PostScript directly, however. Instead, it may rely on third-party developers to build emulation boards that can either be inserted into the host PC or into a small I/O slot on the new HP Laserjet Series II printer. Simpson said a PC add-in board offers high performance but duplicates a lot of the capabilities already in the printer. The I/O slot on the printer, however, may be too small for an emulation board. In any event, Simpson said he expects to see PostScript compatibility available by the end of the year. Simpson said PostScript has few advantages over the Printer Control Language (PCL) already used by all Laserjet printers. One of the only things that PostScript has that PCL does not is algorithmic font support, which no desktop publishing software supports anyway, Simpson said. He claimed PostScript is about 30 percent slower than PCL. Simpson also downplayed the effect of IBM's recent adoption of Adobe's page-description language.