Alexander Skwar wrote:
>
> What I never quite understood: What are the advantages for a single home
> user system? The adv. you listed below are good and all, but what do I get
> out of it? I mean, setting up one printer is not actually hard, is it?
>
Imagine you have an ink jet or a small laser printer. In this case you
get even some options out of the PPD file: the resolution (300 dpi for
very fast draft printing and 600 for the final version), color or black
and white (you save a lot of ink when you use color only if it is
necessary). Some ink jets have also a munual feeder or envelope feeder,
you can use it with CUPS to. Another interesting thing are all the
printer independent options which CUPS offers: You can choose the pages
you want to print, put up to four pages onto one sheet, and especially
for printing at home where you have no duplex unit you can print the
even pages, put the paper back into the printer and print the odd pages
onto the reverse sides. So you have manual duplex for all printers. Or
do you like to print images? Adjust brightness, gamma, saturation and
hue. Texts? Tell your printer a little bit about the font size. And with
XPP you can do all this by simple point and click, as with Billyboys
ever-crashing OS, but without his crashes.
And all the way, Mandrake is also used by companies with a network and
big sophisticated laser printers.
> Would it really be impossible to integrate the options into the current
> printing system? Okay, the user might have to set up some printer spools,
> but so what? They don't take away any space (well, at least almost) when
> not used.
If one does not rewrite the daemon nearly completely one has only one
possibility to get options supported by LPD:
Your ink jet has the following PPD (printer-specific) options:
Resolution: 150, 300, 600 dpi
Printing mode: Grayscale, Color
Paper source: Tray, Manual feeder
Paper size: Letter, Legal, A4
(and all the printer independent options as # of copies, what pages
to print, brightness, gamma ...)
Most Linux distributors do the following: at least they want to support
the different resolutions. For the printer mentioned above they would
install three queues: inkjet150, inkjet300, inkjet600. But if we
continue this idea and support all (at least the printer specific ones)
we need the following number of queues:
#queues = #resolutions * #printing modes * #paper sources * #paper
sizes = 3 * 2 * 2 * 3 = 36 queues
a more sophisticated network printer can have easily 20 or more options
and it is not nice to choose between 2^20 = 1048576 (20 options with 2
choices each) queues for printing on one printer. And do you really
want to type
lpr -P inkjet_300_color_tray_legal <file name>
when you want to print a file? And what is with numeric options as the
brightness?
>
> Hmm, and how do I use that program from a text console? Is it possible to
> use CUPS without your interface?
>
That's possible, and the commands are as you are used to, "lp" or "lpr",
but you can give all options which you are clicking at in XPP also as
command line option. To find out what printer independent options are
available, surf to
http://localhost:631/sum.html
(CUPS must be installed) or start XPP, adjust the desired options, save
them and look into the ".lpoptions" file in your home directory. The XPP
method works also with the printer-specific options. If you read
Dest printer@server OutputOrder=Reverse sides=two-sided-long-edge
in the file, the command equivalent to this is
lpr -P printer@server -o OutputOrder=Reverse -o
sides=two-sided-long-edge <file name>
If you have saved options from XPP these options are not only your
personal defaults for XPP but also for the "lp" command.
> Don't get me wrong here. I'm not at all critizing you or your work at all.
> In fact, I think it's quite tremendous what you and the other folks at CUPS
> did, but I simply don't get, how that would benefit me, and that's all I
> want to know.
>
Thank you for criticizing my first mail, this lead to me explaining some
things better, so that all list members learn more about
state-of-the-art printing with free software,
Till
