Re: Wonderful!

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Re: Wonderful!
by Michael Goffioul on Thursday 06/Dec/2001, @06:22

I don't want to answer all the posts. I'll just try to give some clues. For people having printing problem, some mailing lists exists and we'd be glad to help you if we can (http://cups.sourceforge.net, http://printing.kde.org).

If you're looking for printer support, the first thing you should do is to have a look at http://www.linuxprinting.org. This site has a huge DB about printing under Linux, and you can also download drivers from there. Now, about the printer support under Linux, let me state that the first reason about the poor support is mainly due to the printer manufacturers themselves. So I'm tempted to say that if you really want to complain, send an e-mail to your printer manufacturer. This situation is slowly changing, and some big manufacturer has begun to support Linux. But in most cases, the printer protocol is proprietary and drivers can only be made be reverse engineering, which takes a lot of time.

Being in the printing world for quite some time, I can tell you however that many printers *are* supported under Linux. All PS printers of course, PCL printers (3,4,5, at least), Epson printers, Lexmark printers, Canon printers, even so-called "winprinters" are partially supported (like the PPA printers from HP). In many cases, your printer *is* supported, the only thing is to know how, and that's where linuxprinting.org is useful. Of course not *all* printers are supported, especially some "exotic" ones, because they are not commonly used, especially by people that would be tempted to write a driver for them. In that case, the only possibility is to ask the manufacturer.

I'd like also to add that KDEPrint is not a low level library, it's mainly intended to be a user interface between KDE applications and a print spooler. In no way it deals with supporting this or that printer, this is the job of the print spooler, and KDEPrint doesn't aim to help there.

Bye.
Michael.

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