Bug#931560: closed by Brian Potkin <claremont102@gmail.com> (Re: Bug#931560: cups-backend-bjnp: refuses to print with "out of paper" error)
Although I completely understand Louis' reasoning that still leaves
recent bjnp-cups unusable for people like me. I would like to give a bit
more background about my use case and suggest a couple of alternative
solutions.
My use case:
This specific printer, MG-6150, wastes ink like crazy due to "cleaning
up" every time is powered up and after a number of pages being printed
(I wish I knew that before buying it). I bought it to print my own
pictures once in a while, but most of the time I use it as a "normal"
printer to print documents, receipts, etc.
Because the printer wastes color ink even when printing B&W (which
should only use the BK ink) due to the frequent cleaning, I have
resigned myself to print my color pictures in batches up to the point
where the color ink is almost gone, and then just continue to use it as
B&W printer using only the BK ink -- until I have a number of pictures I
would like to print again, and then I refill all color inks and print
all those pictures.
So what I have done is to configure two printers in CUPS, one for
"normal" printing which is set to B&W, normal paper and low resolution,
etc. There is another "photo" printer which is set to color, photo
paper, etc.
Recent versions of bjnp-cups break this use case, since they refuse to
print if any ink cartridge is empty, even if only the BK cartridge would
be used (this use case works with the Windows driver).
Now, as I said, I totally understand why you don't want to have a
default which could potentially fry users' print heads if they're not
careful. So I have two suggestions:
1. Allow printing if the output is B&W and there is BK ink. I don't know
enough about CUPS internals to know if this sort of metadata is
available to the backend at printing time. This would be ideal since
that would work out of the box and it would be safe.
2. Otherwise, have a backend setting configurable via URL query
parameter in which you tell the backend to skip the ink checks. Ideally
there could be one parameter for skipping just the color inks and one
for all inks. Power users like me can opt in to this behaviour, and
assume full responsibility for any damage they might cause to their
printers due to misuse (that won't be any worse than the situation on
versions < 2.0). This won't affect anybody, unless they read the docs
and understand how to enable this (and the risks).
I urge you to consider one of the suggestions above. I believe that this
bug should not really be closed because bjnp-cups >= 2.0 breaks the use
case of using the printer as B&W printer, which works with the official
Canon drivers and used to work with bjnp-cups < 2.0.
Please let me know if I can be of any help.
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