Recreating a printer from an existing one

Kyle Crawford kcrwfrd at gmail.com
Wed Jul 30 11:10:13 PDT 2008


Hello,

New to the list. I posted this to the apple printing list and got no response, so trying here...

I am trying to capture all the configuration information about existing printers, individually using command line tools. I capture this information to a database so users on another machine can add the same printer to their own machine with a single click without having to know what options and ppd to use. The existing web and pref pane interfaces offer too many options for our end users to setup correctly.

Capturing this info has been difficult to impossible after the printer is created as the command line tools don't seem to give me all the information I need. I've resorted to grepping through the parsed ppd file for OriginalPPD location and grepping the printers.conf for the Descriptive Name. Some parsed ppds don't have an OriginalPPD location or their OriginalPPD location points to a useless temp directory. It seems like MCX printer management also fails to do this as it doesn't get ppd or printer options like enabled trays, etc either.

For most printers I can get enough information to make it work, though I may have to manually enter the path to the original PPD.

I am having difficulty doing this with our USB Epson Stylus C88 printers and possibly all/any USB printer.

I have figured out the url using lpinfo -v, but the PPD is dynamically generated using a Tioga PDE or PrintManager or something.

I do not want to use Gutenprint as I'd imagine that is not supported by the vendor.

Capturing the generated PPD from /etc/cups/ppd/ and attempting to reuse it fails.

How can I accomplish creating this printer from the command line or otherwise automate the proper creation of this printer? Any general advice would also be appreciated.

 Thanks,

 Kyle Crawford






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