Chapter 17Writing Printer Drivers for CUPS

This chapter describes how to write printer drivers for CUPS, including an advanced version of the HP PCL driver included with CUPS.

Overview

Printer drivers in CUPS are filter programs that are associated with a particular printer. Each printer driver consists of a PostScript printer description (PPD) file and one or more filter programs that convert intermediate files into printable data. Figure 17.1 shows the organization of typical printer drivers.

Figure 17.1 CUPS printer driver architecture.

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PostScript printers generally need no additional filters because the built-in PostScript filters can usually ...

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