[cups.general] Card Printer Driver Developement

[Shawn Willden]

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 10:50:36 pm Premjo wrote:
> Our printers have facility to encode on magstripe and chip, how do i can
> incorporate the specific commands to take the card for encoding inside the
> printer? do i can add my own ? i want to show a screen on the tab saying
> color settings, k panel settings, etc. my own screens?

For ideas about what's possible, I'd suggest you take a look at the 
documentation for the "Open Platform" driver for DataCard's SP series 
printers.  It works via CUPS and does everything you mention.

Also, I quite like DataCard's choice of a web services API for the control 
that can't be handled through CUPS (things like determining when the card has 
reached the chip station, or reading data from the magstripe).  It's a very 
well-designed and easy-to-use API, accessible from any language that has web 
service client bindings, which is just about every thing.

DataCard's driver and documentation is available on their web site.  I don't 
recall if there's anything in the license that would prohibit you from 
studying their approach, but since you're obviously a competitor of theirs, 
you should probably read the license carefully.

I work on software that uses card printers, and I can tell you that if you 
follow DataCard's approach, you'll increase the odds that I'll want to buy 
your card printer.

	Shawn.