Re: Support for Apple raster printers now in CUPS and cups-browsed
Thank you for testing, see my further comments below.
On 12/10/2016 03:03 PM, Brian Potkin wrote:
I have an HP ENVY 4500 series inkjet machine. It comes with AirPrint,
which has not seen any use because I do not have an i-device. If it is
of interest avahi-browse shows the text record as
txt = ["Scan=T" "Duplex=T" "Color=T"
"UUID=1c852a4d-b800-1f08-abcd-308d99fafac2"
"note=" "adminurl=http://envy4500.local."; "mac=30:8d:99:fa:fa:c2"
"priority=40" "usb_MDL=ENVY 4500 series" "usb_MFG=HP"
"product=(HP ENVY 4500 series)" "ty=ENVY 4500 series"
"kind=document,envelope,photo" "PaperMax=<legal-A4"
"pdl=application/vnd.hp-PCL,image/jpeg,application/PCLm,image/urf"
^^^^^^^
"qtotal=1" "txtvers=1"]
The "image/urf" under the PDLs (Page Description Languages) tells that
the printer accepts Apple Raster, which usually means that it is an
AirPrint printer.
A PPD is generated for an everywhere queue and for the auto-setup with
the CreateIPPPrinterQueues directive of cups-browsed. The PPD fails with
cupstestppd because of multiple occurences of a couple of options. A bug
in its autogeneration?
Most probably it is a bug in the printer firmware. As it occurs also
with other printers (a guy from Lexmark tested one of their printers for
me and observed the same problem) it would be better if the PPD
generator handles this. Therefore I reported this bug to CUPS upstream:
https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/4933
Please attach the auto-generated PPD for your printer (HP ENVY 4500) to
this bug report. Note that you have to rename it adding .txt to the end
of the filename, otherwise GitHub's issue tracker does not accept it.
Anyway, printing takes place. Nothing complex was used for the test so I
suppose it remains to be seen how well it would stand up for something
serious. But at this point I'm impressed. I suppose if my printer needed
a non-free plugin (it doesn't) I would now have a way to dispense with
it.
HP printers using the proprietary HPLIP plug-in for a driver extension
will not need it any more when printing driverless instead of via HPLIP.
But if an HP printer needs the plug-in for a firmware file will still
need it even if they could print driverless, but I think there is no
such printer as AirPrint printers are designed to work stand-alone
without any computer and therefore must have their firmware built-in.
But even better is that you can drop things like awkward, proprietary
driver packages for Brother and Samsung printers for example. And you
will be able to print on many printers whose manufacturers I did not
mention here.
I've been trying to think of any disadvantages to driverless printing
over using a hpcups or Gutenprint PPD. Are there any?
Currently driverless printing is network-only, as it requires IPP for
querying the capabilities from the printer so that one can generate the
PPD and it also need IPP to send option settings to the printer (as IPP
attributes). Especially PDF and JPEG which are also valid formats on
many driverless printers do not allow embedding option settings in the
data files.
We need to investigate and test more on IPP-over-USB to make driverless
printing also working via USB.
Driverless printing usually allows only adjustments on the printing as
they are thought out by the printer manufacturers, whereas Gutenprint
allows a lot of fine tuning which goes far beyond the manufacturer's
possibilities. So photo enthusiasts will probably like more to print via
Gutenprint.
Another point are the scanners in multi-function devices. These still
need (SANE) drivers and for HP the driver is in HPLIP. The hpcups of
HPLIP is not needed any more for driverless (IPP Everywhere and
AirPrint) printers (running on the network), and hpcups does not really
add any extra adjustments, in contrary to Gutenprint, but note that
HPLIP is from HP and not from a third party.
Till
Reply to: