[cups.general] Cups

Michael Sweet mike at easysw.com
Sun May 9 06:18:36 PDT 2004


John wrote:
> ...
> platforms though eventually. That's sad but maybe what is there in
> printer terms allready is adequate for higher cost specialist
> platforms. Mac's are being catered for increasingly though and I
> understand that their insides are very unixy. What have they done
> that Linux/cups hasn't?

They have put a nice, consistent UI on UNIX, provided lots of key
apps, and they are a big company which provides both hardware and
software.  In short, they can provide one-stop shopping and support
for the life of the machine which is more important for many people
than getting the cheapest hardware and supporting it themselves.

Also, Apple has a long history in the electronic publishing game,
so a printer vendor that doesn't support MacOS will find them losing
share/visibility in those markets.

That said, now that more vendors are doing CUPS drivers on MacOS,
we are seeing a lot more interest in support Linux and UNIX in
general; the printer vendors are starting to see the advantages
of writing a single driver and reusing it on multiple OS's via
CUPS.  Right now this is primarily with laser printers, however
I definitely see this spreading to inkjets and other technologies
over the next few years.

> The two cups mails just arrived on my machine. One on a HP printer
> and another on remote administration. I think that these illustrate
> my point. Neither of these users are likely to be average Joe's. The
> above average Joe probably needs instructions laid out in a for
> example format that cover as many as possible typical printer
> installations. All steps need to be clearly explained. Jargon needs
> to be avoided or explained very carefully. Error messages need to
> lead directly to solutions. Command explanations are probably

We can definitely do more on the hand-holding side of the
documentation, and we will be improving things in the web interface
in CUPS 1.2 to make the documentation less necessary (aside from
pointing the user at the web interface :)

That said, with several thousand potential printers, connection
types, etc., writing a manual to cover them all isn't feasible.
But it probably is something that could be imitated via a fill-
in-the-blank kind of tutorial.

> allready adequate. All of this is I know utopia but attempts could be
> made to at least head in this direction. Another alternative is so
> called 'wizards'. I personally have mixed feelings about them but
> they do mask underlying complexity in situations where this is likely
> to cause difficulties. Ideal for a truly average Joe but the direct

The CUPS web interface implements the wizard approach, however it
still asks for a lot of information that is available from CUPS
itself (like the printers that have already been detected), so
instead of asking the user "would you like to use your Acme FunLaser
printer", we ask a lot of other stuff which may be confusing to
new users.  There are also times where a network printer will
support multiple protocols - how does the user know which is best,
etc.

Apple hides a lot of this information from the user, and I think
we'll be moving more toward that approach in CUPS for the standard
UI, with an "expert" mode to get the "bare metal" interface.

> On the monumental effort involved with gdi emulation I can't comment.
> It isn't an area I have ever had the need to look at but I can't help
> wondering if cups is becoming archaic especially in respect to
> printer availability and cost. It has even been suggested that most
> 'stock' Linux drivers aren't very good. Why should a typical user
> have to buy or produce another one? A windows driver will do all that
> the printer is capable of. It will work straight out of the box. It
> will usually install itself. True more sales may correct this aspect
> but isn't that a chicken and egg situation?

On the GDI front, it is Windows in actuality that is falling behind
on several fronts, which is why MS is moving away from it in their
"Longhorn" OS.  GDI is basically a dumbed-down QuickDraw, which in
turn is a dumbed-down PostScript imaging model.  CUPS can support
*all* of these imaging models transparently to the user, however
in order to wrap a Windows driver we need to provide all of the
Windows services *in addition to* the usual CUPS/UNIX services.

You get your printer drivers for free now because 1) Microsoft
dominates the market and has had a standard printer driver
interface for close to 20 years now, 2) the cost of the driver
can be spread across many units and in some cases across many
similar devices.  The standard interface has been missing from
UNIX/Linux, and it is only now that CUPS is starting to "catch
on" in the minds of printer manufacturers.

> ...  much deleted ...
> They all seem to have simular problems and are unlikely to be equally
> bad. In terms of the facilities offered Samsung would appear to be 
> paragons - if only it would work.

Well, my only comment to this is that the problems you have run into
are not caused by CUPS.  You have KDE, SuSE, and Samsung to thank for
your experience...  I'm not trying to "pass the buck", just to point
out that you could pass on your experiences to those people as well
so that they can fix their respective bits of software and you can
then have a working solution.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com




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