[Sussex] CUPS Answers

[Geoff Teale]

On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 15:29 +0000, Tony Austin wrote:

> Thanks for that Geoff, at least it explains what is happening.  It does,
> however, raise the question of why CUPS would choose to do things in this
> apparently inefficient way instead of sending the small PCL file to the
> printer for decoding?

I can tell you the answer to this, as it is exactly what I expected.
CUPS is a print spooler designed for heavy usage - it assumes that _it_
is handling the load of many people using the printer, it's job is to
let the printer do as little as possible as reliably as possible.
Whilst CUPS is busy dealing with your complex print it can always send
something simpler to the printer, but a printer occupied with rendering
your graphics  can't do anything else at the same time.

Moreover the way that Windows does it is _far_ more likely to cause the
printer to fail to print at all because it does not have enough memory
available to render the page.  

-- 
Geoff Teale
Cmed Technology <gteale at cmedltd.com>
Free Software Foundation <tealeg at members.fsf.org>