"This article presents a brief overview of the main printing systems in use on most Linux systems, with an introduction to the concepts and procedures at the core of UNIX printing. We will finish by approaching the future of Linux printing, and how it is quickly improving.
"It is important to understand that printing in the Unix world revolves almost entirely around the PostScript page description language, developed by Adobe Corp. as a full-fledged programming language used to describe the contents of each page of a document. Many printers nowadays have an embedded PostScript interpreter, which is in charge of rendering the pages to paper using their PostScript description. All modern Linux desktop applications that have a print option will produce PostScript data to print full-page documents.
"This approach is widely different from other desktop-oriented operating systems, and from it stems most of the problems that made Unix printing such a daunting task. Operating systems like Windows or MacOS have much more tightly integrated APIs made available to applications, often exposing the capabilities of the printers and providing an abstraction layer so that applications don't have to worry about device-specific details. Moreover, the printing API is usually integrated with the graphics API used for displaying on the screen, something that has yet to happen with X11..."
