Comments are inline Pascal Kreyer wrote: > On which level will CUPS be integrated ? Between the customer > application and the printer directly or through PAPI ? > > Why should we add cups support on GTK, mozilla products or staroffice if > we send the printers through PAPI ? > We actually don't have to add CUPS support to any of these components. It's a matter of building and shipping the existing code. We haven't done so before because we haven't shipped CUPS. > An another question. What is the actual status of capability support > from the printing project ? Wendy is better equipped to answer this. She has been looking at adding capabilities support to PAPI. > On my point of view, this is certainly most > important that CUPS integration. Should we not create before a solution > that work with 90% of all applications before to integrate any other > print service ? Several years ago, we worked with others to define an interface for that, PAPI came out of that. Unfortunately, PAPI currently falls short in the area of capabilities and has gone largely unadopted. On the other hand, CUPS (and libcups) address this area and seem to be being largely adopted in the open source world.
> Actually only Acrobat Reader use CUPS to obtain the > capability information. > > If i look the different customer request on my side, the most important > is to unify the print dialog box and in same time add the capability > support like duplex, multi-tray and black/white switch support. > Along those lines, the GTK print dialog support for CUPS includes PPD file options. The deprecated libgnomeprint support does as well. The Mozilla support that uses libcups doesn't supply capabilities, but rumor has it that Mozilla is looking to use the GTK print dialog in the not too distant future. I think that StarOffice (OpenOffice) can also use the CUPS interface to get PPD file data for it's dialog. I believe that the same is also true for toolkits like Qt and other applications like Inkscape. Just to throw a wrench in the whole thing, there is work in progress in the OpenPrinting world to create a unified print dialog. (see http://www.mmiworks.net/eng/publications/labels/openPrinting.html) Peter Sikking is working on the UI design and I think that some people are planning on getting together to implement something based on his design work in a couple of months in Europe. There are trade-offs between using CUPS or using LP as your print service. At a very cursory level, CUPS enjoys better desktop application integration than LP and it enjoys a wider set of printer support. On the other hand, LP has some client side name service support and server side features currently not available under CUPS. -Norm
