Printer driver for Mac

[Sebastian]

> On 2008 Dec 2, at 14:22, Sebastian wrote:
> > http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/
> > GS_Printing/
> > Following the link above I can read about the Mac OS X printing
> > system for developers.
> >
> > Then at Wikipedia, reading about CUPS i found the following:
> > "Apple Computer has used CUPS as printing system in their operating
> > system Mac OS X from Version 10.2 (Jaguar) on."
> >
> > The link at developer.apple.com doesn't say anything about CUPS. So
> > how is it? I'm looking for someone to develop a printer driver for
> > Mac, am I looking for someone that knows CUPS?
>
> OSX printer drivers have two components:  the lower level is CUPS, the
> upper level is an OSX GUI.  For printer drivers, unless you need
> special features, you can use a CUPS driver and the standard GUI.  If
> the standard driver isn't enough, it will be necessary to write
> something at the higher level (which will probably plug in as a pane
> in the standard print dialog); the developer.apple.com link should get
> you (or your developer) started on that.
>
> --
> brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
> system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
> electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH
>
>
Thank you for the clear answer!

I'm working on a project (primarily for OS X) that involves printing and probably a custom made printer driver. We're at a stage where we're looking for developers and the question of who we need is whether we can achieve the desired result by just working in the upper level.

Roughly what we want is the following:

1. A user installs our printer driver and during this installation enters login information.
2. The user prints from an application and a PDF is created.
3. The sign in information is validated and the PDF uploaded to our server.
4. The browser is opended. (Selection)

There is of course a little more to it and a few more different user scenarios so the solution must involve prompts and dialogs. For example, if the validation fails the user could get a dialogbox prompting the user for the correct sign in information.

As I see it we have three options:

1. At low level write a CUPS backend that does everything. The question here is if it's possible/ appropriate to handle user inputs and UI releted tasks within a CUPS backend.

2. At upper level get the desired result. But the question here is whether all this can be done at upper level.

3. Or we can divide the process in two parts. One, a more standard printer driver that creates a PDF and execute a seperate application. Two, the seperate application that handles the validation, upload and everything else (Cocoa).

Anybody here developing drivers, how would you tackle this one?

Contact me at sebastian.razola at gmail.com if you find this interesting.