Linux Journal: Overview of Linux Printing Systems

“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…”

Complete
Story