UK TeX FAQ -- question label otherprinters

### Output to “other” printers

In the early years of TeX, there were masses of DVI drivers for any (then) imaginable kind of printer, but the steam seems rather to have gone out of the market for production of drivers for printer-specific formats. There are several reasons for this, but the primary one is that few formats offer the flexibility available through PostScript, and with ghostscript (and its huge range of printer drivers) there is now little demand for new printer driver development.

Thus, it is reasonable to generate PostScript, and use ghostscript to send the resulting PostScript output to the printer you actually have.

(If you are using a Unix system of some sort, it’s generally quite easy to insert ghostscript into the print spooling process, which makes printing really simple.)

This answer last edited: 2013-05-29

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