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by wolrah 2080 days ago
That's interesting that you feel this way, personally I take the exact opposite position. I want printer drivers to be a thing of the past. I just want to pass the printer a file that represents a document and let it handle things for me. Some kind of standard format, probably something in the Postscript/PDF family tree.

Likewise for scanners. I want to just have a HTTP API or something like that where I just "GET" an endpoint and the scanner hands me a file in some reasonable format.

The drivers are always the worst part of devices that allow computers to interact with paper, so let's get rid of them altogether.

1 comments

> I just want to pass the printer a file that represents a document and let it handle things for me. Some kind of standard format […]

…like a bitmap? Turning documents into bitmaps is easy to do in the computer now. We’re a long way from the time when (due to limits on memory, processing, and bandwidth) you had to encode your document into a complicated command language which you could send to a printer.

> […] the scanner hands me a file in some reasonable format.

Like a bitmap?

I really don’t see how you’re disagreeing with me, here.