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I've been a paying FSF member for a couple of decades now. As an observation, not a dig, the leadership and motivation to produce such a project simply has not
by smitty1e 3y ago
I've been a paying FSF member for a couple of decades now.
As an observation, not a dig, the leadership and motivation to produce such a project simply has not precipitated. The FSF itself is probably inappropriate, but a suitable entity might be sprung from those roots.
Put up a bounty for Andrew Tridgell figure(s) to reverse engineer PCL6 or whatever. Clean-room and ethically do it.
- zdw 3y agoWe already have Ghostscript which can rasterize and has been embedded in "Postscript compatible" laser printers. I would imagine that printers ride this line where there's not enough benefit to reverse engineer all the fiddly mechanical bits to make it print, extremely limited hardware expansion, and unlike router firmware or general purpose compute software there's little additional new functionality that would be possible. That said, there are people who hacked printers to make them do other things - for example, the ThunderScan which let certain old dot matrix Apple printers scan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoUYqLteH9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoUYqLteH9Q but that still needed additional hardware added.
- j45 3y agoThank you, I was having a hard time remembering Ghostscript by name. PCL or PS drivers or compatible output with them let you get pretty far too. Coding your own PDFs depending on what you are after might not let you run your own firmware but much more programmatically address a lot of things kn the printer via a document template.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoCirca 2002, I remember printing and binding the PDF 1.4 spec on US Letter paper. It was several 1k's pages of dead trees. The scary parts were the embedding of JavaScript and arbitrary binary data.
- j45 3y agoThe entire pdf spec used to be available from Adobe for free. Now it’s a paywall or maybe not as easy to get. I haven’t had to look at or use the pdf spec in a long time but it might still be valuable to some scanned if it’s not super available.
- merlyn 3y agoISO's customers are ones that only absolutely need to have a traceback to the source of truth with a certifiable chain. For 99.99% of the other people in the world that need it, the PDF spec is freely available. https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf/ https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf/
- 1letterunixname 3y agoGhostscript is commercial and AGPL... a hostile license. Apple brought us CUPS.
- adra 3y agoApple apparently acquired CUPS years after it was available as an OSS project. It fits given that I was using cups so long ago and never heard it as an apple project. https://openprinting.github.io/cups/ https://openprinting.github.io/cups/
- lannisterstark 3y agoHow's AGPL a hostile license?
- mattl 3y agoThe AGPL isn’t hostile to anyone. Apple bought the company that made CUPS and changed the license as a result.
- mattl 3y agoThe FSF is a direct result of Stallman’s previous issues with printers. When I was there we had a black and white laser printer from Imagistics. They did later buy a HP printer but I don’t know what model. It was used just to print letters for their bi-annual member mailing. A lot of printing was done by external companies, including the member newsletter and of course, all the color printing for events. Historically, manuals were typeset with free software but the cover art was made by a third party using Quark on a classic era Macintosh and exported to PostScript. The first few book covers that were made using free software were the Introduction to the Command Line and the modern Emacs manual. I made these in Inkscape on Linux.
- User23 3y agoAnd often you'd take those laser printed proofs to a darkroom and produce plates that way for mass printing.