Re: [Gimp-print-devel] Support for Olivetti inkjet printers

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

On 5/23/20 12:05 PM, Raffaele Tranquillini wrote:
> Thank you Robert. Do you mean that it would be difficult for me to
> reverse-engineer it as there is no standard (or set of standards) commonly
> used to find, or at least start from?

There's not a lot of real standardization with inkjet printers.  For laser printers, there's PCL,
which isn't universal but which is generally supported on all but very low end laser printers (and
most higher end ones will directly accept PDF input).  But for inkjet printers, there's a lot of
variation.  Epson inkjets have various ESC/P2 and ESCP/R variants, but there's still a lot of
per-printer variation.  HP inkjets at least to use variations on PCL; Canon printers have their own.

> I would be willing to try this myself, but there seems to be little or no
> documentation on reverse-engineering inkjets, and to make things worse
> their drivers do not work on modern macOS and Windows machines

You would need to start by sniffing print job data and analyzing it.  It's not an easy process.