[cups] Printing to native XPS printers using CUPS

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 6:50 PM, Helge Blischke <helgeblischke at web.de> wrote:
> As for working filters, see
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/cupsaddons/files/gstoxps <http://sourceforge.net/projects/cupsaddons/files/gstoxps>
> and
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/cupsaddons/files/xpstoodf_or_ps <http://sourceforge.net/projects/cupsaddons/files/xpstoodf_or_ps>
>
> The gstoxps filter uses Ghostscript’s xpswrite device (notwithstanding the deficiencies of this device)
> and consumes both PostScript and PDF (implicitly using Ghostscript’s PDF interpreter).

Hello all,
It has been a while, but I see that in the latest Ghostscript 9.21
released in March 2017, the following change is noted:

"The GhostXPS interpreter now provides the pdfwrite device with the
data it requires to emit a ToUnicode CMap: thus allowing fully
searchable PDFs to be created from XPS input (in the vast majority of
cases)."

References:
9.21 release notes: https://www.ghostscript.com/doc/9.21/News.htm
9.18 notes on XPS: https://www.ghostscript.com/doc/9.21/History9.htm#Version9.18

I assume from the above that in general XPS input and output have been
much improved since 2015, and surmise that it might be possible to use
the filters to obtain a "better" output than before.
Since my system (Debian sid) has ghostscript 9.21 I will probably be
able to do a test on the weekend.

> The xpstopdf (or xpstops) filter uses either GhostPDL’s XPS interpreter (which usually requires compiling
> GhostPDL from the sources) or the xpstops and xpstopdf utilities contained in the libgxps suite, which
> is supplied in some (at least Ubuntu based) Linux distributions.
>
> Both filters have been tested using XPS printout and the XPS viewer from Windows 7
> (due to the lack of a physical XPS-only printer).

I noticed there has been no update to Helge's experimental filter
since 2012, perhaps if the gsxps source has changed, more parameters
might be settable these days.
I will check if gsxps is available on my Debian machine at home (not
available on work Ubuntu machine with GS 9.18 installed) and see if
help shows any more parameters usable.
If anyone has information on this I'd be happy to hear about it.
(The problem, IIRC, was that the output files are bitmaps and thus huge.)

>> Am 04.11.2015 um 00:52 schrieb pipitas <pipitas at gmail.com>:
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 12:04 AM, Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter at gmail.com <mailto:till.kamppeter at gmail.com>>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 11/03/2015 08:23 PM, pipitas wrote:
>>>
>>>> Also, Evince and Okular can display XPS...
>>>>
>>>> Overall, I think if there was a well-working XPS-to-anything print system
>>>> capable of running on Linux, this would increase the chance for competing
>>>> with Windows-based print servers serving Windows clients in certain
>>>> environments, and it would probably also be beneficial for speed and
>>>> overall performance of such an environment (because it could avoid
>>>> required steps on the client side).
>>>>
>>>
>>> Kurt, I was thinking about generating XPS, not consuming XPS, for
>>> supporting XPS+GDI-only printers, like Konica Minolta.
/../

Regards,
Gernot Hassenpflug