question: F-19 and CUPS upgrade.

[William Mattison]

I see in the Fedora-19 release notes that CUPS will be upgraded to 1.6.  The page on
that:


http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/CUPS1.6

says this involves using pdf rather than postscript as the baseline document format. 
While wrestling to get printing working on my system this past spring, the printer's
manufacturer (Xerox) told me that my printer was "GDI" based.  I don't
really know how printers and their drivers work, but I'm guessing that the Linux
drivers for this printer are converting psotscript out by LibreOffice, the Linux print
command, the browser, etc. to GDI, and sending that GDI to the printer.

My question: Will the coming CUPS upgrade break printing on my system?  or has this been
properly accounted for in CUPS 1.6?


thanks,
Bill.

[William Mattison]

>  I'm pretty sure the ps versus pdf is just the way the print job
>  is handed to the driver that converts it to whatever the
>  printer actually needs.
>
>  Certainly my Brother HL-2040 doesn't print postscript of
>  any kind natively, it needs HP PCL. My Epson Artisan doesn't
>  even use a native driver from the fedora repos, it is from
>  some place that produced a 3rd party driver for epson. It
>  has worked unchanged through several releases (including
>  fedora 19). 
ok.  Thank-you Tom.  - Bill.

[Tom Horsley]

>  Did any of those changes involve something as fundamental as the
> change from ps to pdf that is happening here? 
I'm pretty sure the ps versus pdf is just the way the print job
is handed to the driver that converts it to whatever the
printer actually needs.

Certainly my Brother HL-2040 doesn't print postscript of
any kind natively, it needs HP PCL. My Epson Artisan doesn't
even use a native driver from the fedora repos, it is from
some place that produced a 3rd party driver for epson. It
has worked unchanged through several releases (including
fedora 19).

[William Mattison]

>  I think that change is just an internal detail cups cares about.
>
>  I've been just copying my /etc/cups/ppd/ files from one fedora to the
>  next for years now and printing keeps working (and seemed to work
>  in fedora 19 beta as well). 
Thank-you for your comments, Tom.

Did any of those changes involve something as fundamental as the change from ps to pdf
that is happening here?  And is your printer a GDI printer, a ps printer, or a pdf
printer?  In other words, how good of a test is your experience?

Bill.

[Tom Horsley]

On Thu, 27 Jun 2013 07:48:07 -0700 (PDT)
William Mattison wrote:

>  My question: Will the coming CUPS upgrade break printing on my
> system?  or has this been properly accounted for in CUPS 1.6? 
I think that change is just an internal detail cups cares about.

I've been just copying my /etc/cups/ppd/ files from one fedora to the
next for years now and printing keeps working (and seemed to work
in fedora 19 beta as well).