Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 31 Mar 1998 15:57:34 -0600 (CST) | From | "Pat St. Jean" <> | Subject | Re: GGI Project Unhappy On Linux |
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On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Marek Habersack wrote: >On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Alan Cox wrote: > >> > If you, or others, have "busted their secret codes", it makes no >> > difference. You will not be able to use this hard-won knowledge except >> > for your personal entertainment. >> >> You mean you find saying you were wrong tricky. Ghostscript drives those >> HP printers like a champ with no windows around. >But what about the legalese? If the protocols are prioprietary to M$ then you >can't legally use them in a free product? So what's the use of the fact that >you know how the protocol works?
I'm going to weigh in on this one from a little different position. The company I work for is *ahem* deeply involved in printing and plotting. We're members of HP's developers program, which aside from the PPA (Printer Performance Architecture aka winprinter) stuff have bent over backwards to help us out. That being said, in a conversation with HP I was told that there is no way they are going to release the specs. If we were to figure out how it worked then fine, but they weren't telling. From what I could gather, the protocols aren't proprietary to MS, they just removed the PCL/RTL interpreter from the printer to make it cheaper. You still have a rasterization engine, only this time it's in the winprint.dll instead of on PROMs in the printer. One of these days I'm going to figure out the rest of it and write a driver for our rasterization engine. Just haven't had that much time to kill in a while...
Pat
-- Patrick St. Jean '97 XLH 883 psj@cgmlarson.com Programmer & Systems Administrator +1 713-977-4177 x115 Larson Software Technology http://www.cgmlarson.com
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