Reverse Engineering of a Graphics Format?

Jimbo God of Unix asks: "I recently purchased a color laser (Samsung CLP-500) because it claimed to have Linux compatibility. It does, mostly. However, I was irritated to find that the drivers are proprietary (splc, Samsung Printer Language - Color) and somewhat cranky to get working. I was hoping to find some good resources on reverse engineering the graphics format used to drive the printer. I've managed to mostly dissect the file format, so I think I can get the graphics data out, but I don't really know how to proceed to the next step. Are there any good resources for figuring out how to reverse engineer the graphics format? Are there any tools out there that will help me analyze the format (other than hexdump) or tell me if it's close to something else so I don't have to do as much work?" "I have something of an advantage since I can compare the output from the Windows driver to the Linux driver, and I was able to dissect the Windows output file from the info gleaned by dissecting the Linux output file. But I'm kind of stuck at the moment and there don't seem to be too many documents or tools out there for dissecting graphics data.

I thought this might be useful for reverse engineering some of the proprietary image compression formats for web cams as well, but that's a project for another day."

Comments

Lesson Learned

[Solder Fumes]

Never buy anything that claims to work with Linux. Buy things that Linux supports.

Unless you're just adventurous that way, and want to write drivers.

Re:Check linuxprinting.org first

[Apreche]

Yes, it is annoying when drivers or dev kits are built for very specific distros. For this I have found a semi-decent solution. Setup a computer with usermode linux or vmware, etc. For each thing you need a specific distro for, install that distro on this box. So for your case, you would make a standard print server with the distro the driver wants. Then all your other computers can use it as a normal perfectly working print server. Hooray.

This is a problem if you only have one computer since you probably don't want to run usermode linux on it.

Re:This isn't really helpful, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

> I don't understand how companies can sell printers that don't support Postscript

Because Adobe charges rip-off rates for the right to call it PostScript. We stopped making printers when over half of the cost of our printer was the stupid fees to Adobe.