A printer model should be found under a unique manufacturer name and several drivers should be found under a unique model name. This can be chosen freely by the debian maintainer.Ī user configuring his printer should be able to find a printer model and driver for it easily. The naming of PPD files is not important for this specification.An optional further classification of PPDs is possible under "upstream_reference".To avoid possible filename clashes between different packages providing PPDs and to easily seperate PPDs from different sources there should be a further classification refering to the "upstream project" where the PPDs come from and where they were created for.This allows printer queue setup tools to include only the drivers they are interested in. The PPDs should be seperated by printer driver type.
The main idea is to have the following file structure to make it possible for printer queue setup tools to locate the PPDs they are interested in:Ĭommon_directory/ printer_driver_type/ upstream_reference/ filename.ppd PPDs generated when installing package cupsys-driver-gutenprint.This specification affects the following packages: Packages in Debian that provide prebuilt PPDs This allows GUI printer queue setup tools like the CUPS "Add Printer" web interface, gnome-cups-manager, KDE Print Manager and foomatic-gui to provide users a printer model list so they can easily add their printers. These packages should cooperate to form a single database of unique PPDs. There are several packages in Debian that provide prebuilt Postscript Printer Descriptions ( ?PPDs) for PostScript and non-PostScript printers. When writing this specification the ?PrintingFilesystem Specification has been taken into consideration. Please openly discuss this on debian-printing mailing list.Ĭontributors: RogerLeigh, ?Hmh, ChrisLawrence and ?MartinPitt Any comments or suggestions to this Specification are welcome!!!