[Foomatic] My Lexmark X125 driver needs to read from the printer

Enrique Pérez-Terrón enrio at online.no
Mon Jan 12 09:20:29 PST 2004


In article <btsm77$tcn$1 at poblano.linuxprinting.org>, markroth8 at yahoo.com (Mark
Roth) writes:

> Can we add an execution mode to foomatic for "direct-to-device" perhaps?  I'd
> imagine there are other drivers that would benefit from being able to read
> status codes from the printer as well.  Another alternative would be to add a
> second prototype for sending the data to the device once it's been rendered,
> which would default to a pass-through filter.

I have been thinking that the filter or the backend should be able to handle
paper jams nicely by first detecting the printer status after each page,
possibly alerting the user, then, when the printer status is OK, sending again
the page that failed.  At least, it would be nice to have an architecture that
allowed this kind of improvements.
 
> Regarding the network mode, that might be more difficult.  I've had to write
a
> separate driver for the Lexmark X125 for Samba so my wife (who is running Win
> ME) can use my Linux box as a print server.  When Windows clients connect to
> Samba and try to print, the raw data is not properly encoded.  I wrote a
filter
> that wraps the windows raw data and adds the appropriate packet headers to
get
> the printer to print.  The network filter needs to read the status codes as
> well to clear the buffer.

Would it be possible to let the printer appear like a postscript printer to the
network clients?  After all, the server has ghostscript installed.

Otherwise, this could mean that the functionality should be split between the
filter and the backend. That, in turn would mean that the backends must become
more specialized for each printer.

Regards,
Enrique Pérez-Terrón



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