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User tillkamppeter changed the following:
What |Old value |New value
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CC|'easysw,mabrought' |'easysw,mabrought,tillkamp
| |peter'
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------- Additional comments from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mon Sep 22 13:42:51 +0000
2008 -------
I am Till Kamppeter, leader of the OpenPrinting work group at the Linux
Foundation.
In principal, PPD files are a standard defined by Adobe. But Adobe did not
continue its development and now it does not meet the needs of modern printers
and printing environments any more.
With modern color printers you want to do adjustments, like Gamma corrections.
For this you need numerical options. There are also workgroup laser printers
currently which allow password protected printing of confidential jobs. For
these you need string type options to enter user names and passwords. Adobe's
specs only support boolean and enumerated choice options. So Mike Sweet, author
of CUPS, from CUPS made a PPD extension of "custom" options to support numerical
and string options.
In corporate network environments you have printers (with CUPS queues) which are
used by many users through the network. Globalization leads to having people of
many different nationalities in the company, and thanks to the
internationalization support of Linux, they set their desktops to their native
languages. This means that they also want that the printer options appear in
their language and so the options of one and the same print queue have to appear
in different languages. CUPS can only assign one PPD to a print queue and so
Mike Sweet has added a PPD extension for having more than one language in a PPD.
Perhaps he had better modified the CUPS design to support more than one PPD per
queue, to be more Adobe-conforming.
There are several other deficiencies of Adobe's PPD specs for modern printing
environments which Mike Sweet has addressed with PPD extensions, both for
general Linux/unix and for Mac OS X. See
http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/spec-ppd.html
On the Printing Summits which I have organized in the OpenPrinting project,
developers of the Linux printing environments, desktops, applications, printer
manufacturers, and usability experts have agreed on creating a Common Printing
Dialog so that users have the same printing dialog with all applications and
desktops. The dialog was designed by the OpenUsability project.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/CommonPrintingDialog
The dialog has many advanced features, like quick preset buttons, option
tagging, several UI widgets, ... To get the best out of this dialog for a given
printer driver, the driver developer needs some form of control over the dialog
without needing to have his executable code on the clients (in a CUPS system the
driver executable is only on the server, in contrary to Windows). Therefore I
have taken the CUPS extensions to get already a part done without needing to
invent new PPD extensions and I have added some new extensions where needed.
This way driver developers have a good amount of control, by only using PPD
files, the data format which CUPS propagates to clients so that they know about
capabilities and user-settable options of a printers.
The dialog design and the design of the PPD extensions were done in cooperation
with most major printer manufacturers, who want to issue printer drivers which
"just work" with all Linux distributions and applications.
The resulting PPD extensions are here:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/PPDExtensions
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