[cups] PPD API: Status, future and alternatives to handle printer-specific options

Michael Sweet msweet at apple.com
Thu Feb 9 06:33:31 PST 2017


Michael (and all),

Please, let's not go down the path of embedding printer drivers in applications again.  Leave the printer communications and format conversion to the printing system and focus on providing good content (i.e. PDFs) for printing using the recommended APIs.

And IIRC, cups-filters already supports a JCLToPDFInterpreter keyword to handle this implementation detail for you...


> On Feb 9, 2017, at 9:16 AM, Michael Weghorn <m.weghorn at posteo.de> wrote:
> 
> Thank you about that hint about PJL, James.
> 
> In order to set those options, one would then probably need PPD files
> that know what PJL commands to insert for the different options as
> "stephanwib" wrote today in one of the GitHub issues [1]:
> 
>> The best is to use IPP (see CUPS IPP Everywhere support). If a
>> printer doesn´t support that, you probably can control it using PJL
>> commands. I don´t know vendors who offer PPDs that produce PDF+PJL,
>> but you might have a look at some experimental ones from the
>> cups-filters project here:
>> 
>> https://github.com/Distrotech/cups-filters/tree/distrotech-cups-filters/ppd
> 
> I remember to have looked at this a while ago and back then did not find
> much documentation on the vendor's website about how to set options
> using PJL (as you wrote, documentation seems to be very sparse...).
> 
> On 2017-02-09 00:18, James Cloos wrote:
>> The trick would be to determine how the manufacturer's pcl, pxl or xps
>> drivers submit print jobs with those options, and duplicate that, but
>> end the pjl with @PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = PDF.
> 
> Do you have an idea how that would be done? Are the respective Windows
> drivers for PCL and XPS using PJL to set options? Would using Wireshark
> or some other tool be a solution to check what is transmitted over the
> network be a solution or are there other ways?
> 
> (I am not sure that using PJL by doing "reverse-engineering" and
> creating our own PPD files is actually what we want do do, but it might
> at least be sth to have a look at and consider until we can hopefully
> make a switch to IPP-only transmission of options for PDF files.)
> 
> 
>    Michael
> 
> 
> [1] https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/4964#issuecomment-278599237
> 
> 
> On 2017-02-09 00:18, James Cloos wrote:
>> Many (most?  all?) of the "ps-only" ppd options can be sent to the
>> printer with a pdf file if the pdf is encapsulated in pjl.
>> 
>> Documentation for doing that is likely to be exceptionally sparse.
>> 
>> The trick would be to determine how the manufacturer's pcl, pxl or xps
>> drivers submit print jobs with those options, and duplicate that, but
>> end the pjl with @PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = PDF.
>> 
>> -JimC
>> 

_________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer




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