OT: Printing costs, and a surprising find

[Kenneth Brody]

On 3/28/2014 1:27 PM, Fairlight wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 12:52:01PM -0400, Kenneth Brody thus spoke:
>>
>> Interesting article.  I wonder how the printer industry will respond
>> to this.  Perhaps change their drivers to convert Garamond into some
>> similar-but-more-ink-intensive font?  After all, in today's "lose
>> money on the printer and make it up in ink profits" business model,
>> we can't let the consumers save on ink.  (It was bad enough that the
>> courts ruled that using third-party ink can't void the warranty.)
>
> Not sure that's possible.  If you don't use embedded fonts, I thought it
> just sent a raster, as opposed to uploading the font to the printer, then
> using it.  Not sure it's even feasible to try substituting it out.

Even those "host based" printers, where the printer gets a raster image to 
print, it's the printer driver that generates the raster image.  (After all, 
"smart" printers can be passed high-level print language stuff, like PCL or 
PostScript.)  There's nothing, from a technology standpoint, stopping a 
printer driver from substituting anything it wants.

See, for example:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

[...]

-- 
Kenneth Brody