Solomon Peachy wrote:
> On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 10:41:07PM +0200, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
>> I have never connected directly to a remote printer.
>
> It works quite well in Fedora these days.
Well, the printers I had when I had a use for remote printing did not
support it, sharing them through a computer was the only way.
My current printer does support "wireless printing", but AFAIK there is no
way to get it to connect to a secure WPA2-protected WLAN, it can only act as
its own insecure hotspot. And I basically only ever print to it from one
single computer (a non-moving desktop tower – yes, I still own such a
thing), so I do not have a need to use it remotely to begin with. USB is the
simplest solution.
> Stop thinking about this in terms of AirPrint -- that's a very cut-down
> proprietary variation of IPP. What we're talking about here is vastly
> more capable.
>
> There's no reason why the printer can't represent its configuration
> settings via IPP attributes. There's no reason why standard OS print
> dialogs can't represent them to the user.
All this is of no use if the printer does not actually implement that
though.
> You're correct, just not for the reasons you think. These days,
> "User-friendly" means a printer-manufacturer-supplied standalone
> printing app on their smartphone.
I do not see how that is the common use case. Why would I want to print from
my telephone? I do not even normally print from my notebook!
That said, the smartphone hype has completely missed me so far. I still use
a dumb cellphone. I recently got a PinePhone, and I'm only slowly getting
used to it. (It does not even have a SIM card inserted yet because I have
not picked a suitable contract for a smartphone yet.) Android and iOS are
proprietary platforms that I just do not want. (I know AOSP is FOSS, but
Android is more than just AOSP in practice.)
>> So what is the port number then, or if it is dynamic, how do I find it
>> out?
>
> Who cares what port (or even IP address) it's using? If the print
> dialog knows the printer is there, it knows how to talk to it, including
> its web interface. It's just another network printer, after all.
Well, if I want to configure the printer, I need to know what to point my
browser at. But sure, if a dialog gives me a link, that is a way. Though it
means yet another layer of indirection (bringing up the dialog first, only
to get redirected to a web interface).
> (There's no inherent reason why wou wouldn't be able to assign fixed
> ports, though that might get messy when more than one printer is
> involved. Do you also hardcode IP addresses for every system on your
> LAN?)
My desktop and my notebook, i.e., the devices I actually SSH to at times
(from each other, usually), do have hardcoded IPs, yes. (And I also use X11
forwarding when I SSH, so Wayland is a non-starter.)
> We have a native PDF-based print flow, enabling far more consistent
> rendering behavior than pure postscript, as well as a much richer set of
> capabilities.
More often than not, the "PDF-based print flow" just means that something
client-side converts the PostScript to PDF before sending it to the shiny
new "PDF-based print flow", only to have something in the driver filters
convert the PDF back to PostScript before doing anything else. In the worst
case, those conversions are done using ps2pdf and/or pdf2ps without any
options, a process which ends up doing things such as lossy image
recompression. (Those tools do not have roundtrip-safe defaults.)
Kevin Kofler
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