[cups.general] Ink levels with application/vnc.cups-command

[Michael Sweet]

Tim Waugh wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-05-03 at 09:59 -0400, Michael Sweet wrote:
>> Sort of, however I don't think any of the current drivers support
>> the "ReportLevels" command.
> 
> Well, the gutenprint native CUPS driver does, to some extent.  It at
> least tells the printer to report its ink levels, although it doesn't
> currently read them back.  That's what I'm looking at currently.
> 
> I have a patch to get it to use cupsBackChannelRead() to find out what
> the ink levels are.  But at the moment all I can do with it is set
> marker-supply-low-warning on or off.
> 
>> Once we get drivers to implement ink level monitoring (of any kind),
>> we'll come up with attributes to track the exact levels, e.g.:
>>
>>      ATTR: marker-levels=33,44,55,66 marker-names=cyan,magenta,yellow,black
> 
> So I think this is the kind of thing I'm after.  Also HPLIP can give
> fairly more detailed information about ink levels, such as full/low/out
> for all the different ink types.
> 
> What next?

I created a bug to track this so that CUPS 1.3 can support the new
attributes (current CUPS will simply ignore them).  See STR #2378:

     http://www.cups.org/str.php?L2378

Aside from that, the driver writers will just need to use the new
interface (I'll do documentation updates for that as well...)

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com