I have been going over our Unix printing classes to understand them better for
my online book, Inside LibreOffice (found here and very much under construction
- https://www.gitbook.com/book/chrissherlock1/inside-libreoffice/details)
The implementation of the Unix printing subsystem is under the psp namespace,
which I believe implements the psprint printing system - at least according to
this document on the OpenOffice website:
https://www.openoffice.org/gsl/psprint/
And I quote:
> StarOffice 5.2 (and earlier) relied on a thirdparty solution for printing.
> This solution could of course not be open sourced as it was a commercial
> product. So when StarOffice became OpenOffice there was no printing possible
> at all on the Unix platforms; just a wrapper was provided that contained
> stubs fitting the missing symbols left in vcl. A new print solution was
> desperately needed, so a variety of existing print solutions were examined,
> the most notable of which were gnome-print and Xprint. Gnome-print did not
> really fit into OpenOffice.org, since it would require to link against a huge
> amount of other gnome libraries, too, which is unacceptable for
> OpenOffice.org, because we want to run on many desktops. Xprint was designed
> as a standard Unix print solution and has many advantages: code for the
> display would work exactly the same way on the printer. A proof of concept
> version was created by Martin Maher and Oisin Boydell with help from Hamburg
> and the US which made it into OpenOffice.org as a temporary solution to have
> minimal print support on Unix. But Xprint in its current state misses many
> features that become increasingly important: fast character metric handling,
> access to glyph substitution tables, easy configurability on a per user basis
> just to name a few. Also one cannot really say that it has become the
> standard solution for printing on Unix yet; in fact only recently it was
> awakened from its long beauty sleep having its major bugs fixed so it is now
> useable.
>
> This led to the decision that as long as there is no standard solution
> scratching a sufficient number of our itches OpenOffice.org should do like
> everyone else and produce its own PostScript code. Hence psprint entered the
> game.
PrinterInfoManager seems to be the class that does all the management. However,
there is now a CUPSManager. I was wondering what other systems the
PrinterInfoManager now caters for?
I think it currently just uses lpr to do printing, but t I may be wrong.
However, now that CUPS is pretty much standardised on mostly everything -
including, it appears, on an increasing number of *BSD systems - is psprint
still required for systems that are sticking with lpr?
Chris
Sent from my iPhone
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