Re: [debian-printing] Packaging of vendor PPD files.
Roger Leigh wrote:
I have been contacted by Seiko-Epson regarding inclusion of PPD files
for all their laser printers in Debian.
very very good
(good PPDs are very useful)
They are MIT licensed.
the PPDs from HP (in the package hp-ppd) are MIT licensed as well
What would be the best package to place these in?
maybe, epson-ppd
Would inclusion in
the main CUPS package, or as a cupsys-driver-epson-laser package be
appropriate?
nope
but you may want to add
Enhance: cupsys, printfilters-ppd, gpr
Or do PPD files have a wider use with software other
than CUPS?
yes: at least gpr (a GUI that reads ppds and lets you choose options,
that I use a lot to print in duplex mode, and choose printer on the fly
when printing from Mozilla) and printfilters-ppd use them
--------------------
moreover
*) hp-ppd installs a symlink
$ ls -l /usr/share/cups/model
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Mar 1 11:49 hp-ppd ->
../../postscript/ppd
I added it some years ago (on request of an user), and I hope it is
still useful (I don't use CUPS, because I don't understand it);
*) hp-ppd puts PPDs in the directory /usr/share/postscript/ppd : that is
where 'printtool' wants to find them (so , it was similar to RedHat...
until they dropped printtool )
*) I have just uploaded the new hp-ppd, that contains PPDs from
http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/PPD/HP
there are:
1) PPDs coming from HP
2) PPDs generated by foomatic
in that order of precedence
*) it may be nice to have a naming standard; s.o. suggested ppd-<vendor>
which is very nice, but my package is already named hp-ppd :-(
*) one final note: the PPDs from HP where coded in 'MacStandard'
encoding, which was detriment to gpr; I was saved by R.A.Owen, that
provided a script to convert them to Latin1
but in the long run, we may want to code them in UTF8, and/or to provide
a way to internationalize them ( .ppd.po ? )
a.
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