Re: Printing in Thunderbird

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 02:38:14PM +0200, Nicos Gollan wrote:
> On Wednesday April 20 2005 05:40, Bill Moseley wrote:
> > Can anyone explain xprint and how it relates to cups in 500 words or
> > less? ;)
> 
> CUPS provides a printer service which xprint *may* use. The nice thing is that 
> CUPS can basically be used by an interface similar to the one provided by the 
> old printcap-based stuff, so it's just a drop-in replacement with some nice 
> extensions like making the black art of printcap unneeded. All that xprint 
> really does is read the list of available printers from either service and 
> stuff PostScript data into the appropriate queues.

Thanks!  I need to read the cups docs again.  I think some of this
stuff might be less complex for me if I understood the various steps
required to print a file.  Kind of a "this connects to that, and then
piped through this program and then passed to this program which
sends the data out the USB port" kind of description.

Know of any docs that explain the trip a print job takes when going
from a machine to the printer?  For example, if I do:

   lpr test

on my laptop, what is the process that results in it ending up at the
printer?  I kind of assume that lpr submits the job via http/ipp to
localhost's running cups server.  The local cups server then posts
via http/ipp to the server where the printer is located.  Then at the
destination a driver converts "test" into a format suitable for the
specific printer (postscript or raster) -- but I'm missing some key
details there, of course. ;)

I'm not clear how "test"'s mime type is determined, and how (and
where) "test" might get converted from one format to another (pdf2ps,
for example).  Then there's foomatic, gimp-print and ppds that all
fit in, but I'm not clear on exactly their functions.

> xprint itself is -- IMAO -- an abomination unto Nuggan. What it does is set up 
> a new X server that transforms the X protocol (including GLX) to something 
> printable, usually PostScript.

The Xprint faq makes it sound like the greatest thing around.  My
assumption about Xprint is that is allowed applications to use a
similar interface as the application would use for generating screen
output -- but have that output go to a different device (like a
printer).   This would take advantage of all the existing support
(for fonts and drawing) that the X server provides.  Maybe that's
wrong or too simplistic, though.




-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org