[cups.development] Import Filters for ESC/P(2), PCL, etc.

Hin-Tak Leung hintak_leung at yahoo.co.uk
Thu Nov 19 07:53:11 PST 2009


It says pcl and wp and rtf does not work. and most of the rest are covered already by CUPS. The only interesting part is just the epson ESC/P ESC/P2 part.

Your question is a bit strange - are you asking "can I volunteer to do this, and get some help?" or "can somebody else do this for me?" . For the latter the answer is probably no, since there is little demand for just ESC/P ESP/P2 to postscript. For the former, well, nobody can tell you how you spend your time... whether you can get any help, that depends on what level of help you need or require, we'll just have to see.

--- On Thu, 19/11/09, Michael Leimann <mleimann at europe.com> wrote:

> From: Michael Leimann <mleimann at europe.com>
> Subject: [cups.development] Import Filters for ESC/P(2), PCL, etc.
> To: cups-dev at easysw.com
> Date: Thursday, 19 November, 2009, 7:39
> Hi everybody!
> 
> Due to my enquiry in cups.general "Conversion of
> Printstream from Epson (ESC/P, ESC/P2), IBM Proprinter, NEC
> Pinwriter", see
> 
> http://www.cups.org/newsgroups.php?s19666+gcups.general+v19678+T0
> 
> I got in contact with David Chappell at Trinity College in
> Hartford, Connecticut, USA, who has developed the PPR (Page
> Printer Spooler), see
> 
> http://ppr.trincoll.edu
> 
> I found that his system (which is currently a little
> frozen), supports some interesting filters that allow to
> convert printstreams such as ESC/P or PCL to PostScript,
> see
> 
> http://ppr.trincoll.edu/ppr-doc-1.51/refman/ppr-filters.1.html
> 
> My question to him was:
> 
> "Could I use the filter only to do the conversion from
> ESC/P(2) to PostScript?"
> 
> So he replied:
> 
> "Do you mean, can the filter be adapted to work with CUPS?
> 
> Yes, I am sure it can.  PPR filters work a little
> differently from CUPS
> filters.  The chief differences are:
> 
> * They receive options differently
> * They can expect that the spooler will insert resources
> such as
> procedure sets and fonts
> * They can expect that the input will be seekable (a file,
> not a pipe)
> 
> One way you could do this is by writing a program (such as
> a Perl
> script) which did this:
> 1) Copy stdin into a temporary file
> 2) Run filter_dotmatrix with stdin connected to the
> temporary file
> 3) Read the output from filter_dotmatrix and copy it to
> stdout,
> inserting resources as you go
> 
> I have not done much work on PPR lately since I have been
> busy with
> other things.  Maintaining it is a lot of work.  Much of
> this work is
> tedious since it involves keeping PPR compatibly with new
> printers,
> application programs, and operating system subsystems such
> as plug-and-play.
> 
> This is unfortunate since PPR has many capabilities which
> do not exist
> in any other spooler.  I may try to get some of them
> incorporated into CUPS.
> 
> If the CUPS maintainers would like to incorporate
> filter_dotmatrix, I
> would be willing to port it to CUPS.  Perhaps you could
> discuss it with
> them."
> 
> So it seems to be my challange to take CUPS 'where it had
> never been before' ;-).
> 
> I personally would very much like this filters to be
> incorporated into CUPS, but who am I?
> 
> So what do you say?
> 
> Regards
> 
> Michael
> 
> 
> -----Inline Attachment Follows-----
> 
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