Printing Postscript (Was: various problems)

[Reimer Behrends]

On Tue, Jan 20, 1998, Thomas Steffen wrote:
[...]
> one more problem: the HP3LJ here with postscript module 1987 (argh, i
> know) doesn't like lout output (nor does it like recent adobe output,
> ok). Nr 18 postscript error is all it says, i assume a stack overflow.
> any way to get round that? i does not happen with every pages, but
> quite often. and yes, i have told them at least once a day that that
> printer is a pile of shit by modern standards.

I've been in such a situation, too (trying to convince an illiterate
printing device to accept ps output that was perfectly ok). My solution
was to grab a recent release of ghostscript (at the moment I've got
version 5.10 installed) and compile it with the "pswrite" device
enabled. That will give you (a) quite decent fonts (as opposed to early
versions of ghostscript) and (b) postscript output that even the most
stupid of printers should understand. The downside is that files tend to
get quite a bit larger, but when you just need them temporarily for
printing, that should be acceptable (unless you've got a 9600 baud
connection to your printer or something like that). In your particular
case, you might even try to convince ghostscript to produce laserjet
output directly.

I advice against using the "psmono" device, though. Basically, the
output will be encoded as a bitmap (as opposed to "pswrite", which seems
to use vectorization), which not only makes files _extremely_ large, but
also produces noticeable staircase effects when used for italics or
diagonal lines. Of course, in a pinch it might be better than nothing.

                                Reimer Behrends