“…the Open Source Printing Summit being hosted by VA Linux
systems. …is an offshoot of the HP/VA “fix printing” partnership.
A group of developers at VA is doing some work to make printing
better, but any solution will obviously be beyond what they can do,
so they’ve invited basically everyone involved with free software
printing, plus an assortment of printer vendors, to gather here in
Sunnyvale for two days of gabbing, arguing, head knocking,
etc.”
“IBM has over the years written printer drivers for
essentially all printers to support OS/2. They are porting this
project to Linux and releasing it as free software: probably GPL or
perhaps LGPL. The IBM version supports some 600 printers
pretty well; the free software version will of course be rather
more limited, but does provide a large stable of drivers, printer
data, and a rather interesting modular raster driver API structure
which seemed quite appealing to the printer vendors, who could plug
in dither code, and some Gnome desktop folks, who could skip
Ghostscript entirely.”
“At this point I asked the obvious: Corel’s sysAPS exists now
and does much of this stuff, or at least provides a somewhat
incomplete quasi-modular implementation of a well defined API which
meets many of these needs, so why was it not being considered. The
ever-subtle Ben promptly asserted that the sysAPS code sucks. Much
debate ensued over this point throughout the rest of the day.
Investigation into the use or adaptation of sysAPS will almost
assuredly proceed; something is bound to be useful from it, if we
don’t settle upon a descendant of the thing.”