[cups] Printing to native XPS printers using CUPS

[Till Kamppeter]

On 11/03/2015 08:23 PM, pipitas wrote:
> Also, Evince and Okular can display XPS...
>
> Overall, I think if there was a well-working XPS-to-anything print system
> capable of running on Linux, this would increase the chance for competing
> with Windows-based print servers serving Windows clients in certain
> environments, and it would probably also be beneficial for speed and
> overall performance of such an environment (because it could avoid
> required steps on the client side).

Kurt, I was thinking about generating XPS, not consuming XPS, for 
supporting XPS+GDI-only printers, like Konica Minolta.

Straight-forward thought to support them is using the xpswrite output 
device of Ghostscript, which would work fine on desktops and servers but 
would be awkward for phones (to ship Ghostscript only for that on a 
phone). So I thought on a rastertoxps filter as lightweight alternative, 
pages will be embedded bitmaps but one gets the jobs printed without 
diving deep into XPS. cups-filters could contain two filters then, 
rastertoxps and gstoxps.

This needs some work and if there are only a few printers around or if 
this species of printers is not made any more at all, it would be a 
waste of time. Therefore I would like to know how many and which 
printers are of this kind and whether there is perhaps also an 
affordable model which my employer could give to me as test platform.

For the direction of consuming XPS (Windows client sends job in XPS) it 
is no problem to use Ghostscript or GhostPDL, as this usually happens on 
servers or desktops and not on phones.

    Till