The capabilities which the Printer Application reports on IPP requests or in its DNS-SD record are the capabilities of the printer. Internally, it converts the incoming jobs to the printer's native, often proprietary PDL and sends them off to the physical, non-driverless printer on USB, parallel port or with any network protocol like LPD or raw socket (port 9100). It advertises itself, speaks IPP, and understands standard protocols as an actual network printer, and even has an administration web interface. Some years ago Michael Sweet introduced the concept of Printer Applications as replacement for the classic CUPS printer drivers.Ī Printer Application is nothing else than a daemon which emulates a driverless IPP (at least IPP Everywhere) network printer. Michael Sweet has already deprecated PPD files more than a decade ago, when we switched to PDF-centric printing (and the format is also not developed any more by Adobe), but due to lack of a replacement we have continued using them. We are also moving to sandboxed packaging in modern operating system distributions, where applications are completely isolated from each other, having their own file systems and well-defined paths to communicate with other applications.Īnd already several years ago we moved from PostScript to PDF as standard data format for print jobs.Īll this made us rethink how printer drivers should look like. See also the Debian documentation about driverless printing with CUPS. So printer drivers are only needed for specialty printers or legacy printers. These are driverless IPP printers following the IPP Everywhere, Apple AirPrint, Mopria, and/or Wi-Fi Direct Print standards. Modern printers do not need printer drivers (printer-model specific software or data) as they use standard methods for everything: DNS-SD to advertise themselves in the network, IPP ( Internet Printing Protocol, at least version 2.0) as a communication protocol with which the printer cannot only print and inform about its status but also provide a complete description of its capabilities, and known, standard PDLs (Page Description Languages). CUPS, printing environment used by Linux and most other non-Windows operating systems, supports the different printer models with the help of printer drivers, consisting of PPD (PostScript Printer Description) files to describe the printer's capabilities, filters to convert the incoming print jobs into the printer's native language, and sometimes also backends, to support non-standard communication protocols between the computer and the printer hardware.
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