Re: [Gimp-print-devel] ANNOUNCEMENT: Foomatic 3.0.1 released!

[Robert L K. <rl...@al...>]

   Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 14:14:23 +0000
   From: Till Kamppeter <til...@gm...>

   Robert L Krawitz wrote:
   >    Another thing is that using the IJS driver gives also some
   >    foomatic-rip advantage to CUPS users:
   > 
   >    - foomatic-rip supports applying options only to selected pages:
   > 
   >    lpr -P EpsC64ijs -o 1-2:MediaType=Thick file.ps
   > 
   >    This prints page 1 and 2 on thick paper and the rest on normal paper. 
   >    Pure CUPS does not support that.
   > 
   > That would require an addon (e. g. someone could do this to xpp if
   > they so desired), right?  CUPS itself does *allow* different per-page
   > options.

   How does one specify per-page options in CUPS without having
   Foomatic?  Where is this documented?

I don't know.  Perhaps I assumed too much, but Mike wanted
rastertoprinter to set each page's options independently.

   >    - If one uses a Foomatic PPD, PJL options in the database (or
   >    self-added options with foomatic-getpjloptons and
   >    foomatic-addpjloptions) are added to the PPD file. So
   >    printer-specific options as Economode and so are available
   >    (mainly interesting for PCL laser printers).
   > 
   > Is that really a driver issue?  In other words, could Gimp-Print
   > implement those?

   PJL options are printer-specific and independent of the driver, as
   PJL commands are sent to the printer before the real PCL or
   PostScript job data is sent. If one would implement them in the
   driver, one has to have a database of valid PJL options for each
   printer in every driver. So one has a duplicate implementation of
   this database which makes maintaining it difficult. If one
   implements the PJL option database in Foomatic, the options can be
   automatically used with every driver. So once I define the
   Economode option for the HP LaserJet 1100 in Foomatic, it is
   available independent of whether the driver is "ljet4", HPIJS,
   Omni, or GIMP-Print. And none of these drivers had been modified
   for that.

True, although if the driver knows that Economode is being used it may
do things differently (e. g. use a faster dither algorithm, or such).