On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 09:02:14PM +0300, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote: > > This is not exactly what Nadav has described : its a complete standalone > > X Server that is used to render pages to be printed instead of normal > > windows. Except from not working it suffers from all the draw backs of > > the other standalone printing servers (cups, lpd, etc) compared to the > > suggested alternative. > > I did have my share of pain with printing servers.. > > If you read the Release notes from Redhat 9, LPRng is going bye bye soon as > far as Redhat concerned (I assume that Mandrake will follow, and SuSE will > leave it in - hey, SuSE 8.2 Pro now comes on 2 DVD's -- I wonder if the next > version will not include a copy of the whole sourceforge projects!)
lpr is a glorified spooler. It has some filters attached to it. Hardly a complete printing system. See http://lpr.sf.net/ for some useful docs (though no relevant code, I'm afraid). > > With today's printers LPRng and the other LP's (pick your favorites) are > hardly suited to the task, and are very problematic when it comes to: > > * share printer between several machines with different OS's (Windows, Mac, > Linux, etc) > * Support for the newer printers - be it Deskjet based, Laser printers, > plotters > * Support for printer hardware communications - be it USB, Blue-tooth.. > * Support for newer protocols: IPP (Internet printing protocol), Rendezvous, > etc.. > > With Xprint and the LPx printing servers today you'll have a hard time (if at > all) to make those features useful and working... Xprint is not a complete replacement for cups. cups/lpr remains as a backend. It is basically print filter. It renders "images" to bytestream that the printer can understand. Its output is postscript that is fed to the spooler. > > Now lets look at CUPS: > > * it supports all those protocols mentioned above > * The easiest printing configuration available today (be it through the > internal web service, or KDE printing configurations which makes printing > configurations a child play) > * PPD support - just take the Windows CD that you got from your printer box, > search for the PPD file, feed it to the KDE printer configuration - and > you're printer is ready to print - that simple! > * Full support for platforms - be it Mac OS X, Solaris, HP-UX, Alpha, etc.. But how much work was needed to get the "childplay" to work? How much work was needed by the KDE people? by the QT people? What about application support? How much code does every toolkit need in order to support use rendering through cups? (Yes, you realise that this is not a meaningful question) -- Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+ http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
