[devel] Fw: [Osdem]Printing with free Software, Sunday 10:30am

[Alexander Bokovoy <a.bokovoy@sam-solutions.net>]

----- Forwarded message from Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter@gmx.net> -----

Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 17:31:26 +0100
From: Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter@gmx.net>
To: aburet@fosdem.org, osdem@lists.raphinou.com
Subject: [Osdem]Printing with free Software, Sunday 10:30am
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20010914
Reply-To: osdem@lists.raphinou.com

Oi,

here is what I will tell about printing, the talk is aimed to every one 
who is interested in printing infrastructures, interfaces, and drivers:


Printing with Free Software, the New Generation
-----------------------------------------------

For long time printing under Linux and Unix was done with technology of
the 70th, with LPD. This printing system was developed ehen one has only
ASCII text printers and nowadays the printers do much more than only
printing text: Colours, graphics, photos, different paper types,
stapling, binding, and more. But in many cases the ancient printing
system, which does not support all these options and which is also
difficult to maintain in networks, is still used.

Recently the situation changed substantially: New printing systems 
replace the old LPD: CUPS, PPR, LPRng, and PDQ. They give access to all 
the printer's capabilities, are easier to use and to configure, and give 
much more security in networks.

To allow an easy configuration of all existing free software printer 
drivers under all spoolers, I am maintaining an XML database on 
http://www.linuxprinting.org/ which lists all printers and drivers and 
automatically generates configuration files for every 
spooler/driver/printer combo via Perl scripts.

But even with such a database there are still problems as the necessity 
of compiling drivers into GhostScript, no back channels to report the 
printer status, no propagation of printer capabilities info through 
networks, ... These problems were discussed as I have been on last 
year's Printing Summit (http://www.osdn.com/conferences/printing/). 
Solutions for these problems are under development and first 
implementations are available.


   Till


P. S.: I am searching for people who help me maintaining the printer
       database on linuxprinting.org.



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----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
/ Alexander Bokovoy
Software architect and analyst             // SaM-Solutions Ltd.
---
Save the Whales -- Harpoon a Honda.