Fedora 15′s Printing Test Day is next week: Tuesday March 29th.
This test day is for testing all aspects of printing, including setting up the printer, sharing printers on the network, and printing jobs.
If you have access to a printer, please come along and help test things out!
The GNOME 3 printer settings module looks like it will be great. The plan for adding a new printer is deceptively ambitious: the user interface design is that you click “+”, choose a printer device, and then click “Add” and the job is done.
For those unfamiliar with printing, this sounds easy enough. To make the user interface as easy to use as that takes more work than you would think at first glance. It’s the direction I’ve been moving towards in system-config-printer.
Here is a description of the issues involved.
It’s been a long time coming but I’ve finally managed to get native Avahi support implemented in CUPS. This means that CUPS will now advertise its printers using Bonjour. The CUPS dnssd backend can also discover Bonjour print queues. At the moment it isn’t automatically discovered by CUPS, but I hope to get that part done once this work is accepted upstream.
The package with this patch is cups-1.4.5-9.fc15.
Merry Christmas!
In an ideal world there would be no need to choose which printer driver to use, and all printers would use the same driver (or, say, one driver for raster images, and another for vectors). That’s the goal of IPP Everywhere. In the mean while, there is often a choice of different drivers to use. CUPS leaves this decidedly up to the user. The foomatic database contains a list of which drivers are “recommended” for each printer, although this is limited to old-style drivers that use the foomatic engine such as hpijs and built-in ghostscript drivers, and to PostScript PPD files. It cannot recommend native CUPS drivers such as those contained in Gutenprint and HPLIP (hpcups).
I’ve mentioned before about how the automatic printer driver installation feature in Fedora 13 requires IEEE 1284 Device IDs to be provided by both printer devices and printer drivers so they can be matched together. I gave a presentation about this at the OpenPrinting Summit in April.
Since then I’ve been helping Ricoh fix the pieces that needed fixing so that their printers will work with automatic printer driver installation. Impressively, Ricoh has sent me the Device IDs for 785 different devices. This brings the number of drivers without IDs down to 2,605, or just over 25% of the drivers we ship. Previously this was nearly 40%.
Not only that, but now the Fedora 13 cups package retrieves Device IDs from Ricoh network printers that do not have support for the Printer MIB standard. It does this by sending an SNMP query for the “private” Ricoh OID that holds the Device ID string.
