[cups] Printing to native XPS printers using CUPS

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 6:05 PM, Till Kamppeter
<till.kamppeter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Hello Till,

> 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?

Anything workable would be better than nothing at this stage I agree.

> 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.

/../

> 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.

One kind of test we can do without an XPS-capable printer: send the
generated XPS to a Windows printer driver which is XPS-capable.
If the Windows printer driver can understand the XPS and reasonably
print out the result (in the native printer language) on the
associated printer, then I think we can have confidence that the
built-in interpreter in a printer should not have difficulty (each
printer's built-in capability of course might differ a little bit).
I have Windows XP and Windows 7 available, with drivers for my Canon
printers capable of using the XPS print route (usually it means
installing a separate "XPS driver" in addition to the usual printer
driver. Presumably it changes the printer queue to XPS and adds itself
as a filter somewhere together with the regular driver).

Best regards,
Gernot Hassenpflug