Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 14:06 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Printing is declining by tao
Parent article: Help for OpenPrinting needed

> Also modern libraries tend to have great printers

So... how do these libraries print their patrons' documents? How do these "professional services" interact with their printers?

Should we (once again) cede the capability of printing to proprietary platforms?

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 15:36 UTC (Tue) by ianmcc (subscriber, #88379) [Link]

I have no idea how the back-end systems work, but in Taiwan you can print documents at a 7-11 via email your documents to a special address, or upload them to a website, and it will respond with a QR code. Scan that QR code into the machine at any 7-11 store in Taiwan and print your documents. Or you can use a USB stick, but that is a pain compared with just uploading them. Since practically everyone here lives within a few feet of a 7-11 store it is basically impossible to justify buying a printer for personal use.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 18:18 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (3 responses)

Your question is legitimate, however each time I have bought the kind of big printers/copiers libraries have, it came with full Linux support even when the sale representative did not know what Linux was.
You get what you pay for, I guess.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 9:27 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

You get what you pay for, I guess.

Big expensive printers tend to be based around IPP and Ethernet, and you can feed them PostScript or PDF data to print directly without having to convert everything to pixels yourself first. Linux supports that pretty well. It's the el-cheapo proprietary stuff that can become annoying.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 13:43 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

FWIW, Mopria is aiming to make the el-cheapo printers behave a lot like the big expensive ones, by providing a spec that (coincidentally for legal purposes) is a subset of Apple Airprint and Apple Airscan, thus being able to promise that if you follow the Mopria spec, your printer will work out of the box on any recent Windows, Android, Apple or ChromeOS device without the need for the user to install software, but with support for your branding and your special features.

Combine this with Microsoft making installing new printer drivers harder, and the need for OpenPrinting declines - instead of needing support for proprietary formats over proprietary protocols over TCP or USB, you need support for Mopria PDF subset over Mopria IPP subset over TCP or USB.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 14:25 UTC (Wed) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

FWIW, this seems to be the direction CUPS is going as well with CUPS 3.0. Well, it's called "IPP Everywhere", which AFAIU is more or less the same thing as Mopria. Everything not IPP Everywhere is legacy support handled by "printer applications", which take care of format conversions and whatever wire protocol is needed.

See
https://mail.pwg.org/pub/pwg/liaison/openprinting/present...