Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 4, 2021 17:18 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future by re:fi.64
Parent article: Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

That's what printer applications are supposed to help with; a printer application is an application that makes it look like your printer is an IPP Everywhere printer, even if it needs a driver or similar - the driver is embedded in the printer application.

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 14, 2021 7:34 UTC (Mon) by cpitrat (subscriber, #116459) [Link] (1 responses)

But why not create a printer application that supports existing PPD files and even automatically find the one installed in the previous CUPS version so that this is transparent to all users?

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 14, 2021 10:16 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Couple of reasons:

Many printers have PPDs that translate a subset of their IPP Everywhere capability to an old-style PPD for CUPS on macOS. My HP does, for example. You'd need to identify these PPDs and ignore them completely - which is a mostly manual process to begin with, and is best done by the person who wrote the PPD.
Ignoring the automatic reuse of existing PPDs, that's what the PAPPL project provides. It's a library for taking CUPS raster drivers and matching PPDs and producing printer applications.

Basically, doing a good job of an application that supports existing PPD files and the matching CUPS raster drivers is an engineering effort on a par with using PAPPL to write printer applications for those printers that don't do IPP Everywhere already.