Bug#618533: CAPT printers (Re: gs-esp has disappeared)
Rustom Mody wrote:
> My printer is Canon LBP-1210
> Cant see it here -- closest I can see is
> http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Canon/Canon-LBP-1120
Thanks.
To summarize, this is a GDI winprinter with undocumented protocol
(Canon Advanced Printing Technology rather than CAPT2 or CAPT3). It
would be very interesting to hear whether Nicolas Boichat's capt
driver[1] works, and ideally to package it for Debian. If you have
any questions, I'd be glad to help with this. :)
Canon's driver[2] does not seem to come with complete source. It has
many components. The license allows
* various boring things (storage, installation, execution,
public demos)
* modification, but only for one's own use
* reverse engineering, at least for the sake of debugging
modifications of the above sort
* redistribution under the same terms
It is clearly not free software but this looks like a good candidate
for distribution in the non-free archive that accompanies Debian. (I
_think_ distribution along with a patch might even be allowed, but
presumably it wouldn't come to that anyway). It is not obvious to me
whether distributing only part of the driver (say, libs/captfilter
without libcncaptnpm) is allowed.
The promisingly named pstocapt ("postscript to capt") program just
runs
/usr/bin/gs -r<resolution> -dNOPROMPT -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pgmraw \
-sOutputFile=-
to get the image in greyscale and then passes that to the binary-only
libs/captfilter --- presumably it would be possible to learn something
by feeding grayscale images into that program.
I wonder if there is a project out there dedicated to collecting
information from reverse-engineering the CAPT protocol.
[1] http://www.boichat.ch/nicolas/capt/
[2] http://software.canon-europe.com/software/0040567.asp
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