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| Hakan | Hello, I got confused reading on https://www.ghostscript.com/doc/9.54.0/Deprecated.htm about unidriver and other output devices. Is there an useable HP-RTL output device ? ...From the documentation : uniprint is a unified parametric driver by Gunther Hess <ghess@elmos.de> for several kinds of printers and devices, including....HP-RTL | 08:21.56 |
| artifexirc-bot | <HakanUsakli> joined Discord too now | 08:26.12 |
| | <KenSharp> Those are **derprecated**, but not removed, the Uniprint driver is still in shipping versions of Ghostscript, as you can easily determine by doing gs --help and reading the list of included devices | 08:26.40 |
| | <KenSharp> Oh welcome to Discord 🙂 | 08:26.49 |
| | <KenSharp> As for a useable HP-RTL device, I have no clue. | 08:28.33 |
| | <HakanUsakli> the pxlcolor device (HP-PCL) works wonderful, I was looking for the existance of a mature and reliable HP-RTL output device for use on non-PDF/Postscript capable modern HP DesignJet Printers. Almost every other largeformat Inkjet manufacturer supports HP-RTL language as well. I will test if the uniprint model works but it seems very old and outdated, probably only a basic implementation which cannot be used in real world cases. | 08:32.18 |
| | <KenSharp> I'd have thought that description pretty much covers teh RTL langauge itself | 08:32.55 |
| | <chrisl> Uniprint claims to support outputting HP-PCL/RTL | 08:32.56 |
| | <chrisl> @HakanUsakli "Old and oudated" is probably why it is listed as deprecated - it was a device written by us, despite not being in contrib, it is a contributed devices, and the original author is no longer available to, or interested in maintaining it. | 08:34.38 |
| | <chrisl> @HakanUsakli "Old and oudated" is probably why it is listed as deprecated - it was *not* a device written by us, despite not being in contrib, it is a contributed devices, and the original author is no longer available to, or interested in maintaining it. | 08:34.53 |
| | <chrisl> @HakanUsakli "Old and oudated" is probably why it is listed as deprecated - it was *not* a device written by us, despite not being in contrib, it is a contributed device, and the original author is no longer available to, or interested in maintaining it. | 08:35.03 |
| | <chrisl> FWIW, converting Postscript and especially PDF (or XPS) to RTL is *never* going to produce very nice results, in the general case | 08:36.29 |
| | <HakanUsakli> He did not respond to my email from a few months ago either (which was in German language where I grew up, quite close to his City). I tried my luck to see if he has any interest in updating his work a bit. | 08:36.58 |
| | <KenSharp> Well its 'Raster Transfer Language' and used for sending bitmaps to plotters (allegedly) so presumably it just renders the content to a bitmap and sends that to the printer wrpped up with whatever RTL needs | 08:37.30 |
| | <HakanUsakli> PDF > PNG with GS Raster device and then package the Raster Data as HP-RTL, why wouldn't that produce good quality ? | 08:37.34 |
| | <HakanUsakli> exactly what KenSharp said | 08:37.46 |
| | <KenSharp> Its going to produce big old bitmaps | 08:38.00 |
| | <chrisl> Plotting a contone image?? | 08:38.06 |
| | <KenSharp> Probably in RGB | 08:38.08 |
| | <KenSharp> @cjhrisl apparently so yes | 08:38.16 |
| | <HakanUsakli> Yes, Bitmaps, RGB. | 08:38.22 |
| | <chrisl> I mean: how good quality do you expect a plotter to produce from a contone image | 08:38.42 |
| | <chrisl> ? | 08:38.44 |
| | <KenSharp> Well RGB bitmaps on a CMYK device are going to produce colour shifts | 08:38.49 |
| | <HakanUsakli> its CAD content, not contone | 08:39.05 |
| | <HakanUsakli> and general purpose graphics | 08:39.13 |
| | <KenSharp> It seems like RTL was originally intended for plotters, but HP printers can use it too (its a subset of PCL apparently) | 08:39.29 |
| | <chrisl> It is included in some implementations of PCL/5 - a bit like HP GL/2 | 08:39.59 |
| | <KenSharp> I can't think why anyone would use it instead f PCL if PCL is available | 08:40.15 |
| | <chrisl> But "general purpose graphics" is where I would expect problems to arise | 08:40.29 |
| | <chrisl> My point is not "don't do that", but "be aware of the limitations" | 08:41.16 |
| | <HakanUsakli> HP Sells their devices without a PDF/postscript interpreter by default. That feature on the firmware costs a lot of $. Plus a lot of other largeformat manufacturers support HP-RTL (Plotfiles) before PDF was king as well. The goal is to print PDFS on a non-Postscript/Non-PDF capable largeformat printer, that can understand HP-GL2 and HP-RTL | 08:41.44 |
| | <KenSharp> If the printer can't handle PCL then you don't have a lot of choice. If it can handle PCL I'd iuse that. | 08:42.23 |
| | <HakanUsakli> At the moment I use the devices' drivers via code and convert to the PDF using the windows driver | 08:42.30 |
| | <KenSharp> But anyway, the point is that teh Uniprint device is still present. | 08:42.35 |
| | <HakanUsakli> understand | 08:42.41 |
| | <KenSharp> But since we cannot maintain it, we will drop it at some point, unless a volunteer comes forward | 08:43.06 |
| | <HakanUsakli> with PCL I ran into some byte length issues which I think RobinWatts looked into at some point, 36x60 inch PDF file, 300dpi = 10,800x18,000 pixels, 24bit RGB. I tried with MUPDF PCL output and it had problems encoding in chunks of 32kb because it was designed for smallformat documents. I will try the uniprint and pcl options. Thank you for the info | 08:45.24 |
| | <chrisl> And I'm sure you are cognisant of the conditions of the Ghostscript license..... | 08:45.51 |
| | <HakanUsakli> certainly | 08:46.28 |
| | <chrisl> I just want to make sure you don't put in a load of work and then find the license is a problem - it's happened before! | 08:50.03 |
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