[Openicc] Introduction / Gutenprint

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 11 Apr 2005, Gerhard Fuernkranz wrote:

[ stuff removed ]

> That's a brief summary of my understanding of printing, but maybe others have 
> a completely different understanding.

This is how I prefer to think of printing as well.  I tend to think of 
printing as preparation of another format which may use a 
(potentially) device independent description of the document.  This is 
what I think of as the "Adobe" model.  With this model, the 
application does not care if what it produces is processed for a 
"dumb" device by another application on the same system, or is sent 
over the network to a "smart" printer which does the remaining 
processing.

The thinking of many is influenced by the Microsoft Windows GDI-based 
printing model in which applications use operating system programming 
interfaces to "draw" what they want the system to print.  The 
operating system then uses a driver to convert that description into a 
binary blob of data targeted for a specific printer.  With this 
approach, the application accesses the printer by using an operating 
system library and therefore does not directly prepare any formatted 
data for the printer.

The advantage of the "Adobe" model is that it is more likely to 
produce "portable" output which may be supplied to a variety of 
printers and it is not tied to device drivers.  The advantage of the 
"Microsoft" model is that applications only need to know how to use 
system drawing APIs (potentially simpler) and since since there is no 
intermediate form, printing may be more efficient.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/