[cups] How to enable AirPrint in CUPS

[Michael Sweet]

Rick,

"We" as in "Apple" and the "Apple printing team".

There is no article, and we have not published the results of our testing (almost 6 years ago now) nor do we plan to.

Printing of emails and web pages to Letter/A4 media generally works, but as soon as you go beyond that things fall apart pretty quickly.  Here is a short list of what does not work when using CUPS as an AirPrint server:

- Ready media (that's how you get to pick media sizes on iOS)
- Many printer status keywords ("out of paper", etc.)
- Proper media selection and scaling when printing photos
- Proper media selection, rotation, and scaling when printing PDFs
- Duplex printing with some drivers
- Color/grayscale mode
- Copies (yes, really!)

Some of these deficiencies would require major changes to CUPS and its driver architecture to fix, others require driver and (in some cases) printer firmware updates to correct.


> On Oct 16, 2015, at 9:07 AM, Rick Cochran <rcc2 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> 
> What you mean "we"?  Can you give me a reference to an article which explains this inequality?
> 
> On 10/15/15, 8:30 PM, Michael Sweet wrote:
>> You can publish DNS-SD records and iOS will use them, but you can't make cupsd advertise them for you since we know CUPS + drivers != AirPrint.
>> 
>> (It often works but can fail in spectacular and frustrating ways, which is why we don't support AirPrint sharing from CUPS...)
>> 
>>> On Oct 15, 2015, at 5:30 PM, Rick Cochran <rcc2 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> This is odd.  I'm doing it right in my own home using http://www.avahi.org/. Works fine.
>>> 
>>> -Rick
>>> 
>>> On 10/15/15, 5:05 PM, Michael Sweet wrote:
>>>> Brian,
>>>> 
>>>> The short answer is that you can't. Printing from iOS to CUPS is explicitly blocked since most CUPS drivers lack the functionality needed for AirPrint.
>>>> 
>>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>> 
>>>>> On Oct 15, 2015, at 3:55 PM, Brian Corbin <brian.corbin at ibethel.org> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> We are running CUPS 2.1.0 running on OS X 10.11.  We are a big organization that has a lot of printers to share and it’s working great with CUPS.  The only thing we can’t figure out is how to enable AirPrint in CUPS so that all our iOS devices can see the printers being shared on our CUPS server.  We have a lot of iOS devices and they would like to be able to print to all our printers.  Any help in this process of how to enable this functionality in CUPS would be awesome!
>>>>> Thanks!
>>>>> Brian
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> cups mailing list
>>>>> cups at cups.org
>>>>> https://www.cups.org/mailman/listinfo/cups
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> cups mailing list
>>>> cups at cups.org
>>>> https://www.cups.org/mailman/listinfo/cups
>>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> cups mailing list
>>> cups at cups.org
>>> https://www.cups.org/mailman/listinfo/cups
>> 
>> _________________________________________________________
>> Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> cups mailing list
>> cups at cups.org
>> https://www.cups.org/mailman/listinfo/cups
>> 
> _______________________________________________
> cups mailing list
> cups at cups.org
> https://www.cups.org/mailman/listinfo/cups

_________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair