[cups] printing from CUPS 2.0.3 with LPD to a Windows 8.1 box USB printer

[Helge Blischke]

> Am 05.03.2016 um 08:49 schrieb Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de>:
> 
> El día Friday, March 04, 2016 a las 08:53:25AM -0500, Rick Cochran escribió:
> 
>> I wonder if perhaps this is a "Version 4" driver issue.
>> 
>> Starting with Server 2012, Microsoft created a new print driver environment 
>> called "version 4" or "Class" drivers. They have a lot of very good features 
>> (google it), but they accept only "xps" format print jobs. Thus you cannot print 
>> to a Server 2012 machine which uses Version 4 drivers from either an OS X or a 
>> Linux machine.
>> 
>> I believe Microsoft changed their driver system for Windows 8 at about the same 
>> time, and of course Windows 10 would have carried that forward.
>> 
>> Just a guess. Could be wrong.
> 
> Thanks for that guess. But it is not that case. The customer reactivated
> an old Win XP computer, connected the same printer through USB. It
> prints fine from XP itself, but not from CUPS to the LPDSVC. The symptoms
> are the same: the job arrives, gets stuck in the queue on Win for some
> seconds and gets deleted.
> 
> I'm now (after this test with XP) unsure, if it is not as well a CUPS issue not
> being able to produce something that the print (HP DeskJet 2510) can
> understand...
> 
> 	Matthias
> 
Looking into the sources of HP’s HPLIP package, especially looking after what
the hpcups filter does, reveals that this printer speaks a language „PCL3GUI“.
This is sort of a proprietary language which has only some syntactic resemblance
to what HP has published as PCL3 but is neither a subset nor a superset of that.

I’d suggest to compile that hpcups filter from the sources (you probably need to tweak
the build system to some extent for bypassing the libusb stuff on the FreeBSD box)
and then configure the printer using the lad backend with the option „format=l“ in the
device_uri.

For testing, you could even generate such a printer stream on a Linux box and 
print it as raw data to the Windows box, just to be sure if the printer behaves as expected.

Helge