Re: PPD vs printer driver question
On 10.11-17:01, Predrag Punosevac wrote: [ ... ] PPD files are post script description files that act as a drivers for post script printers. This seems clear to me. no. they simply describe the functions available on the printer. this allows the interface to display those printer options to you. for PS compatible printers this is enough, you select the options and the document, with the selected options, are passed along to the printer. for non-PS printers the options are passed to the backend processor which produces the relevant commands for that printer. with CUPS you'll (most likely) have ghostscript as a backend processor. this comes with support for a good range of printer backends (e.g. PCL) as well as being easily extensible with vendor processors (like the hpijs processor from HP). with lpd and apsfilter you process the incoming text or latex file into postscript. this works fine if the printer supports PS. if not then you'll pipe that postscript onto ghostscript which will then process the PS into the native printer language (e.g. PCL).
PPD vs printer driver question
For the past couple hours after the Jacob's answer about apsfilter I was reading about Unix printing. I am getting more confused about the real meaning of PPD files and printer drivers. According to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_Printer_Description PPD files are post script description files that act as a drivers for post script printers. This seems clear to me. According to same page CUPS-PPD are used by CUPS to do post-script printing on non-postscript printers by directing files through CUPS-filter. Could somebody explain this things better to me. Every time I used CUPS the PPD files where enough to enable me printing. Did I really use some other drivers beside these PPD files or did CUPS communicate with my printers with some generic driver and just uses PPD files to do filtering. In LPD it seems to me that this is more clear as when I run ./SETUP apsfilter I am really question to select the driver from the Ghostscript collection. Thanks to ALL Predrag
Re: PPD vs printer driver question
Predrag Punosevac wrote: For the past couple hours after the Jacob's answer about apsfilter I was reading about Unix printing. I am getting more confused about the real meaning of PPD files and printer drivers. According to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_Printer_Description PPD files are post script description files that act as a drivers for post script printers. This seems clear to me. According to same page CUPS-PPD are used by CUPS to do post-script printing on non-postscript printers by directing files through CUPS-filter. Could somebody explain this things better to me. Every time I used CUPS the PPD files where enough to enable me printing. Did I really use some other drivers beside these PPD files or did CUPS communicate with my printers with some generic driver and just uses PPD files to do filtering. In LPD it seems to me that this is more clear as when I run ./SETUP apsfilter I am really question to select the driver from the Ghostscript collection. Thanks to ALL Predrag This http://www.linuxprinting.org/kpfeifle/LinuxKongress2002/Tutorial/III.PostScript-and-PPDs/III.PostScript-and-PPDs.html did clarify more things to me but I would like to learn more. Any Adobe or CUPS developers around?
