[GTALUG] printer options

[Stewart Russell]

On Feb 8, 2018 6:31 PM, "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:


Printer settings can get even more complicated when you look at ppds.
I think that is because different printers have different settings.


I'd strongly advise any sane user to avoid looking at PPDs. Initially they
were a fairly concise way for manufacturers to define the options a printer
could support. They were written in a PostScript-ish format that wasn't
impossible to follow. It used to be possible to build a new PPD from an old
model printer's PPD and get a working, if limited, driver.

CUPS changed all that. CUPS sticks far too much into a PPD: not just device
specs, but proprietary driver features and almost all internationalized
settings and error messages. This means that PPDs have lost much of their
use as a config file and become effectively impenetrable. In trying to get
an Epson printer to do everything that it's supposed to do, I had to hunt
down the same setting in 11 different languages. If I left just one option
off, the PPD failed with errors (sometimes in the language I hadn't fixed).
It's all no fun.

Cheers
 Stewart
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