[cups] Printing to native XPS printers using CUPS

[Helge Blischke]

> Am 08.09.2017 um 06:15 schrieb Gernot Hassenpflug <aikishugyo at gmail.com>:
> 
> 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.)
> 

> Regards,
> Gernot Hessenpflug

As for the „experimental“ filter, I’m rewriting this thing to a more general
gstofoo filter with foo specified by the name the filter is called as.
Currently, I test using the Ghostscript devices
pdfwrite, ps2write, xpswrite, pxlmono or pxlcolor,and txtwrite. 
As soon as I succeed with testing all this stuff, I’ll publish it at sourceforge 

BTW, as far as I can tell up to now, the xpswrite device hasn’t changed very much since.

Helge