[cups.general] ditherLine available in libcupsdriver in 1.4-1.5, future directions

[Michael Sweet]

On Jan 23, 2012, at 9:23 AM, Johan Henselmans wrote:
> I have to implement some kind of halftoning in the driver I am updating, 
> and noticed that the ditherLine code that was available in the cups book 
> example was missing from 1.3, but reappeared a cupsDitherLine in the 1.4 
> cups in the driver folder, and was used in rastertopclx.

The example in the CUPS book never made it into CUPS itself.

> It also seemed that the rasterfilter examples in the filter folder would 
> be superseeded by the examples in the driver folder

That was the plan, but there has been very little up-take in those drivers.

> I just svn-ed 1.6 to see if there might be some new developments in this 
> area, and noticed that the driver folder was missing altogether.

Right, it has moved to the Open Printing repository which is hosting all of the filters, backends, and support code that isn't used on Mac OS X.

> I thought of perhaps using that library (libcupsdriver) for my own 
> filter, but now I am unsure.

You are better off rolling your own code or, if your driver is open source, using the code in your driver directly.

> Can anyone tell me what the best way will be to develop printer drivers 
> for cups, going forward? (Preferably Michael...)


In the near term, do as I outlined above.  In the long term we hope that printer drivers will no longer be needed thanks to efforts such as IPP Everywhere in the Printer Working Group and IPP-over-USB in the USB Implementers Forum.

________________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair