[Printing-architecture] Some suggestions for the DNS-SD (Bonjour) printer support in the dialog

[Michael Sweet]

Till,

On 2013-06-13, at 8:49 AM, Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/13/2013 01:39 PM, Michael Sweet wrote:
>> 
>> The issue here is that the other end will need to support the file formats and options you are passing.  If you supply a local PPD then cupsd will convert into a format that the other end can handle.
>> 
> 
> Here one could easily restrict the support to printers with standard
> PDLs so that a handful of filters is enough. Then one sends always PDF
> and tell by IPP attributes which output format and which option
> settings. So what one needs is the right IPP attributes to tell CUPS the
> output format (instead of needing it hard-coded in a PPD).
> 
> Would be great if CUPS is capable of this, but if not, I have an idea.

Current CUPS doesn't support this, but I *do* have code that already does this in other shipping software.  One of the goals of post-1.7 is to explicitly support this kind of configuration, without PPDs (although we will likely generate PPDs for legacy applications for at least a little while yet...)

> One would need a pdftoany filter which calls first pdftopdf (if pdftopdf
> is installed, we could leave it out on mobile) and then one of
> pdftoraster+rastertopwg, pdftops, nothing, gstopxl,
> pdftoraster+rastertopcl, depending on what output format was requested
> by an option (IPP attribute). Problem is how to make the queue using
> this filter without having a PPD with hard-coded paper sizes (perhaps
> System V interface script?).

One of my interests in MuPDF is the ability to create just such a filter in code. And to make it clear, my focus is on using MuPDF to support IPP Everywhere (PWG Raster and PDF) printers - legacy printers can continue to use the old PPD-based driver approach or whatever we come up with in the future (i.e. that "Driver as an IPP Everywhere service" approach I mentioned in a previous email...)

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Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair