[cups.general] Why not "recommend" PPDs in the NickName?

Till Kamppeter till.kamppeter at gmail.com
Wed Jan 24 08:15:18 PST 2007


Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Jan 2007, Marcelo Ricardo Leitner wrote:
>> Windows users are happy to see only one driver, mostly provided by printer
>> manufacturers and thus are known to work. But when we come and show a list
>> to the user, we must provide him some information for initial guiding.
> 
> 1. Agreed on the "provide some information for initial guiding" (I.e.
> "(recommended)").
> 
> 2. Do not step backwards removing the multiple drivers.  We were actually
> better than Windows until "(recommended)" was removed, and we could have
> been perfect if we provided a comments field giving the human being
> information on which driver to choose based on his needs (IMO).
>

I will not take away any of the existing printer/driver relations in the 
database, as there are enough situations where an alternative driver is 
helpful, as for example with the LaserJet 1320 which has not enough 
memory for PostScript or also if the recommended driver is not 
installed. The best would be some kind of ranking for all the drivers 
which work with a given printer.

>> IMHO it is worse to give options and no clarifying informations than give a
>> hint that works probably >90% and that big warning.
> 
> Agreed.  And I don't even care about the big warning, it doesn't take a lot
> of intelligence to know that if you have three drivers for a printer, and
> just one is recommended, doesn't mean the two others won't work.  The
> question everyone will have is "why".
> 
> Instead of starting a game of adding useless warnings, add enough
> information so that people KNOW why a driver was recommended, and why the
> other drivers exist.  What we do need is a "comments" field where one can
> add information like this to the PPDs:
> 
> Examples:
> 
> FooLaser 9999 PostScript
>    This driver is very fast for pure text, and very slow on images unless
>    your printer has been upgraded with extra memory.  It allows the maximum
>    resolution of 1200x1200 DPI to be used, which makes it the best driver
>    for workloads that require high image quality.
> 
> FooLaser 9999 PCL-5e (recommended)
>    This driver is very fast for text and image printing, but it is limited
>    to 600x600 DPI resolution, which is not the device's maximum capability.
>    It is the recommended driver for this printer as it has the best
>    performance across all workloads.
> 
> The above comments apply to a real world device, btw, but I changed the
> name.
> 

Usually I have added comments like this in the main comment text of the 
printer entry. Problem is that one cannot get these texts into the 
output of "lpinfo -l -m", so the user of a printer setup tool based on 
CUPS's listing of models and drivers cannot show the texts.

    Till





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