Any chance of HP LaserJet and overall improved printer support?

[Castellen]

as years go by, beside many leftovers in MOS/AROS/OS4 one thing is constantly bothering I: inability to have a decent print, since some old zkul days of dot matrix and early inkjets, which used to come with AOS drivers.

Not sure what PostScript support is like under MOS/AROS/OS4, but at least under OS3.9 I have no problems using an HP2550 colour laser.  I bought it new a few years ago, though I see HP have now discontinued the model.  I suspect not many of the budget/consumer grade printers offer PostScript support, hence the need for special print drivers.

I mainly print via the PostScript output from PageStream and FW97.  You can use the same PS output to convert to PDF using GhostScript or ps2pdf.com, which works fine with IBrowse. For applications without PS support, TurboPrint has LaserJet support, but I think it's black and white only.  OS3.9 includes PS drivers too, though I've not used those.

[Castellen]

HP 1020 (my bad, seen the mark) is PostScript driver to best of my ability. Does the print to file old school magic and then using some sw to make it print to PCL works?

If the printer is indeed PostScript capable, then you're good to go because AmigaOS has good support for PostScript.  As others have said, it may not be PS compatible however.  I've just generated a couple of PS test pages in PageStream.  To test your printer, just copy the PS file to the printer, e.g. copy PS_test_colour.ps >PAR:

If it's PS capable, then you'll get a print of the test page.  If not, you'll get nothing, or garbage.


While I usually avoid these borderline political type discussions....

As others have said, it may be unreasonable for Hyperion and the MOS folks to spend the thousands of man-hours necessary writing dozens of custom print drivers to support various printers that use their own proprietary language when they could instead continue to focus on core OS functionality.  Obviously they have a finite resource in terms of software developers and of course they are wanting to use this wisely.  Printing via the PostScript standard is supported fine at present, hence it makes sense to use a PostScript compatible printer.

If anything, you could argue that printer manufacturers are at fault for not using the standard printer control languages which readily exist.  Or you could blame consumers for encouraging manufacturers to do such things by purchasing such non-conforming products.  PostScript was developed in the late 1970s to form a common language to talk to any printer, which is a brilliant idea and in theory eliminates the need for many combersome proprietary drivers, which seems to be the case with most low-end consumer grade printers.  You could hardly use the excuse that PostScript is too new on the block or not commonly known.  It's hardly the fault of Hyperion and MOS that printer manufactures decide to deviate from such standards.  The entire point of such standards is so that different bits of hardware can correctly communicate.  PostScript does exactly that as far as printers are concerned.