[cups] Inquiry about MacOS and Linux's CUPS

Michael Sweet msweet at apple.com
Thu Aug 31 04:30:56 PDT 2017


Jin,

> On Aug 30, 2017, at 9:32 PM, Jin Guojie <jinguojie at loongson.cn> wrote:
> 
> Recently we are porting some printer drivers from MacOS to Linux (probably Debian).
> Does Apple add any improvements or other modifications based on the open-sourced version?
> Whether there is any difference between MacOS's CUPS and the CUPS server in Debian?

There are some minor differences in CUPS itself due to a number of patches that each Linux distribution adds to the basic CUPS releases on Github, but the bigger differences are in the supporting filters on each OS.  macOS uses print filters based on CoreGraphics while Linux uses filters based on the cups-filters, Poppler, Ghostscript, and MuPDF open source projects.  But in general each project produces comparable output and has similar features...

> If we simply recompile our printer drivers and let it run on Debian,  what is the probability that the Linux binary runs well? Is there any possibility that we should modify the PPD file or the printer-side filter source?

As long as you do not depend on any macOS-specific frameworks or features, the drivers should "just work" on Linux once you recompile.

_________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer



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