[Desktop_printing] Current PCL laser drivers are SLOOOOWW!

[Till Kamppeter]

TORATANI Yasumasa wrote:
>>Anyone of the OpenPrinting vector driver team here? A short presentation
>>of the progress od your work here on the list would be nice.
> 
> 
> Following is the opfc project front page in English.
> http://opfc.sourceforge.jp/index.html.en
> 
> One of the links in the front page is;
> http://lx1.avasys.jp/OpenPrintingProject/index_e.html
> This site describes the outline of the project background, and has the links
> to the sample implementation source code, "openprinting-jp-0.1.3.tar.gz",
> though, I believe, it's not a latest one.
> 
> The following souce code in the source forge project is the latest one.
> http://prdownloads.sourceforge.jp/opfc/13897/opfc-ModuleHP-1.1.1.tar.gz

I have tried out this driver, on a machine with installed ESP
GhostScript 8.15.x (with "opvp" device) and foomatic-rip, and CUPS one
does the usual "./configure; make; make install", restarts CUPS and sets
up a queue (for example with the web interface). Unfortunately, I do not
have a CLJ 4600 or 5500 and had to try it on the LaserJet 4050, a bw
printer. Here all what is not white gets printed in black but otherwise
the printout is OK. Would this driver work also on a pure PCL-5c/5e
printer (older HP LaserJets). Can the driver easily be expanded to bw
printers and to 1200 dpi?

> I think, "opfc-ModuleHP-1.1.1/opvp/HPPageColor.c" is the driver code.
> I found that the comments in the above code were written in Japanese,
> so, these should be re-written in English, so that this sample code will be
> able to help people to understand the opvp driver interface as well as the
> PCL generating process.
>

Please tell me when there is a version with translated comments, so I
can recommend this code to people asking me how to do best to write a
driver.

> This code was written by EPSON Avasys people. If you have some question,
> please ask to this ML, or I'll foward the question to EPSON Avasys people if
> no one from EPSON Avasys is here.
>

Yes, soon the recommended driver for the HPs will be the one from Epson.

   Till