About non-PostScript printers

The UNIX world and the professional publishing world in general has standardised on PostScript as the printer control language of choice. Software, applications and utilities on UNIX and UNIX-like systems such as Linux, hurd, etc are designed to produce either plain ASCII text or PostScript-formatted output for sending to plain text or PostScript printers; they have no native support for printers that only understand PCL, bit-mapped graphics or the Windows GDI format. This is not a problem with the ICTprintservice printers since they all understand plain text (ASCII) and PostScript as well as PCL. But if you want to use the ICTprintservice UNIX/Linux documentation to help you set up printing to your own inkjet, PCL laser or even dot matrix printer, these additional notes will hopefully be of some help.

To print to non-ASCII or non-PostScript printers, the plain text or PostScript ouput needs to be converted to whatever language the printer will understand. This is done using printer filters - the raw text or PostScript data stream is fed through the filter which converts it to a PCL, GDI bit-map, raster, HP/GL (for plotters), etc output strema that can be fed directly to the printer (or plotter). For PostScript conversion, many of the popular UNIX/Linux print filters actually use GhostScript for this; although often thought of as a utility for displaying PostScript files and documents on the screen, the GhostScript system is far more complex than this.

GhostScript is modular in concept - accepting PostScript and other data stream formats such as PDF as its input, GhostScript has a vast collection of output drivers that support a wide range of PCL, bit-mapped, Windows GDI and other formats such as Group 3 fax as well as the humble desktop display screen. All of the printing subsystems - LPD, LPRng, CUPS and Solaris - described in the ICTprintservice documentation are capable of working with GhostScript to drive specific printers, plotters, fax modems and other devices.

This page is still under construction.