(OT) Open source PCL to PDF converters?

[Fairlight]

Confusious (Walter Vaughan) say:
> Fairlight wrote:
> 
> > Then again, I don't do printing. 
> 
> It must be a generational thing.

It's a practical thing.  I have no need of hardcopies.  As Jay told me
about a week ago, "You can't grep dead trees."  You can't.  And since I
always have a system handy, all my stuff is in files.  I can go diving
through them, copy and paste, etc.

For other businesses, I can see it.  Bills of lading, contracts, medical
records, etc.  Not debating that.

I just have zero need of it.  I haven't printed anything other than a
receipt from a web purchase (strictly so my wife knew what I'd done) to my
wife's printer since...1993?

> Heck we should be able to print directly to anything.

We should be able to stop making war, colonize Mars and develop zero-point
energy, too.  The reality is that we can't at this time.  Woulda, coulda,
shoulda--and getsya nothing.

> If a tool was smart enough to interact with the OS and deal with things as 
> complicated as serial printing on a 1 Mhz processor, why in 10 years and 3000 
> times powerful systems, why can't they stand up and give us what we need.

You paying them to do so?  I'm sure a donation to the project team of your
choice, suitable enough to compensate them for their time, would go a long
way towards making it happen.  Unless someone has an interest in doing it
for kicks, it won't happen unless it's funded.  As was pointed out, there
are numerous commercial packages available.  It's possible to do it, just
not for free.

Sometimes people seem to confuse open-source with free.  Sometimes people
start demanding development without being willing to contribute a thing.
That's taking it too far.

Sure, a free OSS solution would be great.  Find someone with an interest in
printing who can afford the tremendous time sink you're talking about with
a project like this.  Hell, the PDF module for perl isn't even more than a
stub yet, basically.  I blame Adobe.  Open standard or not, it's convoluted
bloat.

> What happened to the flying cars that ran on cold-water fusion?

Cancelled with "The Jetsons."

mark->
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