What drives me crazy is why are there always new drivers for printers? At this point isn't there more than enough compute power in the devices to supply a consistent abstract interface?
PostScript has never been that consistent, and the abstraction is decidedly leaky. Having to upgrade the RAM in your printer in order to print more complex documents is not a fun experience. As it happens, I think a lot of modern printers do expose an abstract interface - it's just generally a proprietary raster-based one that doesn't involve running arbitrary user-supplied code.
HP goes out of its way to avoid putting PS support into its consumer level printers. I can only imagine it's to trim money spent on internal RAM since any common embedded processor these days has the power to run an on board RIP.
I'd seriously wonder if the infrastructure to support putting that into drivers, deployments, testing of different versions, etc exceeds all the RAM savings cost at this point.
At this point, I don't recall - I've gone over to only buying network capable printers as they do tend to be better about their drivers (still need somthing usually) - but the ones I've been looking at lately seem to speak some dialect of PCL.
most windows xps printer drivers just convert the xps into the printers native language. And maxing out one core for the exe that initiated the printing.
