Slashdot Mirror
IETF Working On New Printing Standards
A reader writes: "The IETF has announced that they are developing new printing standards for network printing." Printing -- exciting, eh? But one of those necessary evils in life.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I have been looking at CUPS which is free/open software, but the company charges for filters. Does anyone know of an effort to write free filters for CUPS? If free filters were available it would have a much better chance to become a Unix standard.
Internet printing protocol. The ability to print to a printer anywhere from the Internet (more or less).
Nice, yes, but will spammers decide to also start trading around 'Printer Numbers' containing printers open and ready to print? So besides opening that mailbox and dealing with 10 pieces of spam, we also have to deal with a printer that's been spammed. Of course, it would get spammed when we have that all-important report to print out...
(hmm. Interesting DoS idea - flood the printer so the company keeps wasting paper/toner/ink/etc and no printouts can ever be made).
I guess we'll need to have the requisite header printouts like on faxes too...
What would be really neat would be if they could implement a rendering model based either on XML + CSS, or DVI, both of which are open standards. An XML based rendering standard would have more hope of catching on, though a DVI based one would almost certainly yield (substantially) better output.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The standard has been around since 1996, fully documented and open. What this is is the IETF giving their stamp of approval (after concerns about security etc). Microsoft implemented the standard minus one feature, which allowed you to pass a URL to a printer, and have it download and print the document itself.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Describing how to send a document across a network (a printing protocol - IPP) in no way replaces or overlaps with a definition of the makeup of that page (a page definition language - PostScript).
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
If I read you right, no. For the same reason I can happily spew stuff from Word to my Linux printserver via Samba, and also via "Print To File..." and then "lpr filename". The data being printed should be transparent or inconsequential to the protocol, so all that remains is a 'middleware' level between your print driver and printer.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
You're being just as self centered, hoping that you can reap benefits of others work when you put no energy into the work. I dont really worry about what Linus and others think (but I will listen to what they have to say, and weigh it). Frankly, if Linux 'lost' in the mainstream desktop market, I'd still use linux, and so would a lot of other people. They'd keep making it better. The linux community is self sustaining, because it's based on hobby work, rather than commercial work. As long as one person is working on some part of linux, it's not dead.
I'm happy if someone does some work that in the end benifits me, and I appreciate it. I will use printer drivers and stuff under linux if i happen to get a printer, but for me it's not a big priority. The original poster said very little useful, and was swearing a lot. Some shitty printer support, and even a 'loss' on the desktop market (which is hardly possible unless some other system with the same or stronger merits comes along) wont kill linux.
Nobody's changing it. And there is more than one way to handle print spooling in Unix already.
lpr isn't so great. I haven't reviewed IPP as I haven't needed it, but I assume it's designed to work in larger networks, too. Networks that suffer from failures, high latencies, low bandwidth, so on.
Also, it's a single protocol approved by several OS companies. Meaning we don't need to set up samba on Unix or separate lpr on Windows - Unix will come with IPP as the standard print queue as will Windows. And Mac. And anything else You want. Perhaps even Bluetooth Palm with IPP - want the notes You wrote in the meeting onto paper? No need to first sync to computer and then print through samba which redirects to remote printer using lpr - the remote printer being two meters from where You stood when You wanted the notes on paper.
We're only dismissive because it's basically finished. Let's see: lpr and Postscript. and smb if you need to use Windoze. Everything else is window-dressing.
I had to beg to get a postscript printer at work. The vast majority of printers there are HP PCL LaserJets. Most of the postscript printers disappeared along with the Macs when Windows was declared to be the standard corporate platform.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Maybe I'm too old, I find it much easier to read text printed on a good laser printer. CRTs are low rez and hard on my eyes.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The UNIX lpr protocol avoided dealing with most of those issues and assumes the whole world is PostScript or ASCII and having minimal security. And Windows now has a proprietary solution for installing drivers and other issues.
I hope IPP won't go overboard. Many of the issues I mentioned, I think, are best left unaddressed, because if the printing protocol makes it too easy to create a proliferation of configurations and printer drivers, people will do just that. But something a bit more featureful based on HTTP I think would definitely be a step forward.
The only new thing about this seems to be the introduction of the use of HTTP, seemingly predicated on the consideration that this gets you past the firewalls that hide the other ports.
Which makes this about as secure as SOAP, which essentially implements DCOM atop HTTP.
While it would be nice to have something a bit more sophisticated than LPD , that's hardly news when I've heard "Maddog" Hall comment on this more than once, and I don't hear him lecture every year.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I put together CUPS on a FreeBSD server. It's a dream.
With a quick trip to Windows Update, download the Internet Printing update, and add printers with the location of http://corporation.com:631/printers/hp4000 (A work around, since MS Internet Printing doesn't allow you to use ipp://...) and bam, that machine can print to that printer from anywhere. Before anyone can print to the printer they need to A) be from an approved IP, and B) enter a user name and password. At the moment I'm not using SSL, but that's an option to add security.
Currently I have no problem printing documents from anywhere in the state back to the home office.
The CUPS suite can accept LPD print requests, with Samba can handle SMB print requests (although you'd only want to do that for NT 4 and Win3.1 clients). It has a web-based interface for both configuring/administering the printers as well as viewing the print queue. And print classes allow you to effortlessly set up a single queue for several printers.
Of all the things Unix does right, printing was a administrative heap of dung until CUPS. If you're not using it, you're probably working too hard.
If your office is moving to a dispersed office (everyone telecommuting) then CUPS and IPP is your best option for allowing workers, from home, to print back in the office.
On a final note, I'm not really sure why anyone finds pushing IPP through a firewall difficult. It's all on TCP port 631. It's just HTTP. Maybe just that no current turn-key firewall software has a button/checkbox to "enable IPP"?
Tarzan like global standards. He think they smart. Tarzan wonder: what were the other 25 companies? Do they "play well with others?"
dude, relax. i dont have a printer. a lot of geeks dont. remember linux is primarily designed for geek users, by geek programmers who are also geek users. half of us dont need to print. frankly, I dont care too much if linux doesnt become a primary desktop end user OS in big business. I would rather geeky sys admins and the like use it to get the back end stuff done.
cut down on the swearing, you'll sound smarter.
Ermmm, no. PostScript dominates the high end, yes, but AppleShare doesn't have much of a showing any more. It's all TCP/IP over ethernet. In fact, at the high end, such as the larger newspapers (the ones I was working on sold in excess of 4 million copies/day), PostScript printers aren't found anywhere. PostScript is ripped to bitmap on a regular computer, and the bitmap is sent to an imager that prints a negative (or these days, direct to plate with a CTP machine). Similarly, proofs are ripped to bitmap, and then converted to a suitable format for the proofer in question, usually PCL.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
There are several things it doesn't address very well. The main one is that it is a hack on direct network connected printers: you can print to them but then the printer has no way of communicating status back.
Compare with say, how printing on Appletalk works, where you open a bidirectional channel to the printer, and it tells you on the channel if it's out of paper or whatever.
Furthermore, lpd includes no way of managing networked printers remotely. How do you set up access lists, or retrieve accounting information?
lpr is a 'just good enough' protocol. Don't believe that it can't be improved on.
Could somebody explain to me why it's a good idea to layer this on top of HTTP? As far as I can see, it doesn't really solve the firewall problem; the article specifically says they'll run on different ports so that admins can firewall all IPP traffic. Last I checked, HTTP actually used a fairly inefficient file-transfer mechanism. Given that the modern corporate document is filled with images and charts and sundry multimedia (and therefore bloats pretty quickly), wouldn't it make more sense to layer this on top of, say, FTP? Why is it layered on top of anything at all? What does HTTP provide that IPP needs?
I'm sure there are some answers to these questions, because I believe in the IETF and I personally have only ever designed toy protocols, but I don't see the answers in the article.
Of course, unless you're in a fortune 500 company, chances are they aren't too into the whole infrastructure of the thing and won't be too keen on getting workgroup printers.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Is there anyone out there that knows the present ratio for tech support calls?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Oops, hope the backslashes don't make there way into the protocol :)
zaugg
Well, this is pretty exciting to those of us who actually make the printers... We make specialty industrial printers. IPP is nice in that status and printer capabilities can be returned from the printer. This means that conditions like paper out and ink levels can be reported back to the user. As far as I know, lpd and SMB can't do that. (If they can, let me know! I've got a nice inkjet attached to my Linux box at home, and I'd love to get it to report ink levels to the Win98 clients that print to it!)
Let's face it, printers today have more computing power than desktop machines did a few years ago. Let's treat them like the independent computers they are, rather than as some dumb peripheral plugged into an isolated machine.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Only in the linux world would the one killer biz app (transfering a document to paper) be treated with such a dismissive tone.
___