Hello Rose,
On 16/062005, you wrote:
Anyway, to get back to computer CUPS (rather than a foaming glass of brew), a bit of research last night convinced me that CUPS, gimp print and/or Foomatic are all of great interest, but the best system for printing that also provides many drivers not available - or easily identifiable - elsewhere is Turboprint.
I also came across a fairly detailed explanation by a professional printer driver writer explaining the problems in writing drivers other than for Windows: basically, a lot of the processing is done by the OS rather than the printer, as this makes for faster printing and cheaper printers. However, this also means that the printer driver as supplied by the manufacturer has to rely on API "hooks" in Windows.
While this is to some extent true, its mainly only those printers labelled as Windows printers, generally cheap inkjets (and now some cheap lasers as well), by paying a bit more you can get printers that use standard print languages (postscript, HPL, ESC/2 etc), as far as Im concerned something similar to the Unix way of working would be a good stop gap (and is the way CUPS works really), which is to standardise on (say) postscript output and then the print system converts that to the specific driver for your printer (ghostscript does this already as does CUPS I believe). Of course it does all depend how long this is going to take (the porting of OpenOffice.org that is), if it takes us a couple of years, the over productive Frieden's (and the rest of the OS4 team) may well be on OS4.2 with an all new printing system, so I say wait on this bit for now, unless we are being asked to port something because there is nothing in the pipeline.
CUPS itself really isnt much more that a management system for the drivers and printers (from postscript to whatever driver you have requested) (as far as I can tell of course). We do need something like it, that allows an interface to set-up various parallel/USB/network printers with ease, but Im not sure that CUPS itself is the best idea (although maybe something that could use the various CUPS/ghostscript drivers would be good, as this is the difficult bit. IMHO)
What was not adressed, as one person pointed out in comments, was the existence of a similar system to the Windows API in CUPS. However, it does seem as though the difficulty in getting drivers for anything other than Windows is partly due to the difficulty of writing printer drivers, ignorance of the existence/usage of tools equivalent to the Windows API in other systems (MacOSX Darwin, anybody?), and an understandable refusal to release technical information which comes under company IP. Even the Microsoft service that exists only to ensure that printers work with Windows doesn't get that information.
While I'm still all for CUPS, this does give food for thought.
Printing has been in my mind for a while as well, what with the generally fairly poor state of Amiga OS printing, anything has to be an improvement really.
Regards
Mark