At the 2nd Printing Conference, Ben Woodard outlined a proposed structure for a 'new printing system'. One of the components was a 'device interface manager'. This would provide a layer of abstraction for local devices, as well as support device discovery and other things.
If you have some time, I suggest you might want to look at the: Linux Parallel Port (http://www.torque.net/linux-pp.html) -- list of projects near the end The HP OfficeJet projet HP OfficeJet Project (http://hpoj.sourceforge.net/) -- interesting list of printers supported And here is a very interesting one: hpoj reference: ptal-mlcd The ptal-mlcd daemon implements the HP MLC (Multiple Logical Channels) and IEEE 1284.4 packetized transport protocols over parallel ports and USB, and enables access to the various MLC/1284.4 services on the peripheral, such as print, scan, and PML. Applications use the PTAL frontend API to access local or remote peripherals, and libptal accesses locally-connected peripherals controlled by ptal-mlcd through the use of Unix-domain sockets, which, unlike TCP/IP sockets, are not accessible across a network. Currently, ptal-mlcd performs parallel-port I/O by accessing the hardware registers and performing the IEEE 1284 ECP- and nibble-mode signalling directly from user mode, with no kernel or accelerated hardware assistance. On the other hand, USB support depends on kernel printer-class device support. You should also look at the API that is defined as part of this work. Patrick Powell ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- YOU MUST BE A LIST MEMBER IN ORDER TO POST TO THE LPRNG MAILING LIST The address you post from MUST be your subscription address If you need help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or lprng-requests or lprng-digest-requests) with the word 'help' in the body. For the impatient, to subscribe to a list with name LIST, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with: | example: subscribe LIST <mailaddr> | subscribe lprng-digest [EMAIL PROTECTED] unsubscribe LIST <mailaddr> | unsubscribe lprng [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you have major problems, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word LPRNGLIST in the SUBJECT line. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
