[cups.general] Print PDF direct to printer

[Michael Sweet]

Unfortunately, the Windows printing system does not offer a way to  
"pass through" PDF data, so there is no way (at present) for you to do  
this.

On Nov 13, 2009, at 1:01 AM, Christoph Litauer wrote:

> Dear cups users,
>
> very often students complain about the time it takes to print some PDF
> documents to our (fast) printers. I tracked that down to the following
> situation:
> - the documents printed are pdf converted ppt files with transparent
> backgrounds or backgrounds with color gradients.
> - the students print 2- or 4-up.
> - they print from windows clients using the windows cups driver.
>
> Due to the fact that postscript isn't able to represent transparency  
> or
> color gradients, the generated postscript code is 40 to 50 times as  
> big
> as the pdf source. This postscript code is printed very slowly (up to
> several minutes per page).
> A workaround would be installing a PCL driver for theses printers. But
> the resulting pcl code is nearly as big as the postscript code. When  
> the
> document is on the printer it is printed very fast, but the printing
> process on the windows client takes lots of time (10-20 sec./page). So
> this doesn't seem to be a sufficient solution.
>
> A better solution would be sending the PDF code directly to the  
> printer
> as the printer is able to print pdf and does this very fast.
>
> I wonder wether it would be possible to get a (possibly generic)  
> windows
> driver that doesn't convert the pdf documents to postscript or pcl.
> Instead it should modify the PDF code as to use some printer special
> features (input tray, duplex, color vs. greyscale etc.) and send pdf
> code to the cups server. Then it would be easy to configure cups to
> detect windows generated pdf code and send this code unmodified to the
> backend.
>
> -- 
> Kind regards
> Christoph
> ________________________________________________________________________
> Christoph Litauer                  litauer at uni-koblenz.de
> Uni Koblenz, Computing Center,     http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~litauer
> Postfach 201602, 56016 Koblenz     Fon: +49 261 287-1311, Fax: -100  
> 1311
> PGP-Fingerprint: F39C E314 2650 650D 8092 9514 3A56 FBD8 79E3 27B2
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___________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer