[cups] Printing to native XPS printers using CUPS

Till Kamppeter till.kamppeter at gmail.com
Fri Oct 16 02:05:38 PDT 2015


On 10/16/2015 05:56 AM, Gernot Hassenpflug wrote:
> That means we are on our own for the time being.
> I have been looking around for printers to test with, but
> unfortunately I cannot find (yet) any reasonably cheap second-hand
> devices on auction here in Tokyo that would make it feasible for me to
> obtain.
>

Would it be complicated to make a simple rastertoxps driver, sending all 
pages as bitmaps to the printer, so needing a tiny subset of XPS only?

Advantages would be:

- Quick implementation as based on a tiny subset of XPS
- Independent of Ghostscript so it can be used on mobile devices with 
only Poppler available
- Print quality should be the same as with other raster/host-based printers

Disadvantages:

- Vector graphics sent to the printer allows more detailed color management
- Depending on internal architecture of the printer, vector graphics 
could be processed faster and less resource-consuming.

The disadvantages are probably not so severe, as sophisticated color 
management is only needed in a few situations, especially not when 
printing from mobile devices and modern printers are powerful enough to 
print full-page bitmaps.

WDYT?

Volunteers welcome!

If someone contributes such a filter I would add it to the cups-filters 
package. Should be not so difficult for who has an XPS printer for 
testing and using another rasterto... filter from the cups-filters 
package as template.

    Till



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