Should work with almost all network printers. But not usb printers.
Why is that? Not because of connection but supported languages? I have a HP Deskjet 3630. It's connected to my wifi network so is technically a network printer. But it's also an AIO home printer that only supports PCL3GUI and not PS or PDF like an office printer.
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As mentioned in another post, printer.device use a gs interpreter which is old so I need to update this one with a newer version.
Well, what ever it is based on, the PS interpreter is just a driver. And most printers need direct PS support or they won't work. As for GS in OS4, I'm not aware of printer.device using it, it was external AFAIK? A newer version should be installed with AmiPS and AmiPDF from Enhancer.
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Still working on converting raw text to graphics, so this is not finished.
Is this because the printers don't support ASCII any more? In that case it's out of your hands really. It's not your job to convert ASCII into a printer raster, that's a lot of work needing fonts used and all sorts of technical details. Unless doing very basic printing most people would be printing documents which are all graphics. Suppose you could just render a bitmap in the default proportional font and dump that to the printer.
Status of airprint is that it is still under development and testing. So far you can print pdf, ghostscript and jpeg files, also printing from Odyssey. Also supports ssl now. Not bugfree yet, but works ok for most users, but experienced some crashes for some.
Progress has been going somewhat slow due to little spare time to work on it, but working on it as soon as I have time 😀
At the same time I have also been working on Airscan.
Added ssl support to that as well + some other features, this version is soon ready and will be uploaded to os4depot this month.
Why is that? Not because of connection but supported languages? I have a HP Deskjet 3630. It's connected to my wifi network so is technically a network printer. But it's also an AIO home printer that only supports PCL3GUI and not PS or PDF like an office printer.
Yes, this is due to my program supports only ipp at the moment, this is due to this protocol is well documented and is the best chance to support as many printers as possible. Most printers you buy today supports this protocol.
When finished and program is working fine with this protocol, I might add support for the other kanguages as well.
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Is this because the printers don't support ASCII any more? In that case it's out of your hands really. It's not your job to convert ASCII into a printer raster, that's a lot of work needing fonts used and all sorts of technical details. Unless doing very basic printing most people would be printing documents which are all graphics. Suppose you could just render a bitmap in the default proportional font and dump that to the printer.
Yes, most new printers does not support direct ascii printing trough ipp, but most of them support raw printing still. So I can dump text to printers trough the raw printing port, if sending text trough ipp I need to convert to rasterfile first.
You are right in that converting text to graphics require a lot of information of fonts used etc.. And f.ex printing from notepad I haven’t found a way to retrieve font information. So my plan is to just use a predefined font and size at the moment. I am using IntuitionText for converting to bitmap, which makes the work easier for me.
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Well, what ever it is based on, the PS interpreter is just a driver. And most printers need direct PS support or they won't work. As for GS in OS4, I'm not aware of printer.device using it, it was external AFAIK? A newer version should be installed with AmiPS and AmiPDF from Enhancer
Most ipp printers I have used, does not support PS, but the formats they usually support is pwg-raster and jpeg formats.
If GS this is updated trough enhancer that would be great, and then I probably haven’t installed it, because my version of GS sometimes fails converting pdf’s.
When testing and prigramming this printer device this is for me what looks like is happening:When printing from AmiPDF or AmiGS it sends command to GS trough amiga_printer device of GS and communicates trough Exec msg, GS creates graphics trough printer.device which then again is sent to the selecter printer driver. This driver decides what to do with with the graphics, in my case it is converted to raster format, this will then be transferred to a new device, in my case airprint.device this device sends it to printer in the correct format.
Yes, this is due to my program supports only ipp at the moment, this is due to this protocol is well documented and is the best chance to support as many printers as possible. Most printers you buy today supports this protocol.
Ok I understand now. Needed to refresh my memory. I was aware there was a LPR driver but I don't recall testing it as my X1000 is connected to my printer over USB.
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When finished and program is working fine with this protocol, I might add support for the other kanguages as well.
So checked and my printer supports PCLm and ARF. PCLm looks interesting as it's some kind of PDF format. So apparently my printer is better than I thought it was for a budget home model.
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Yes, most new printers does not support direct ascii printing trough ipp, but most of them support raw printing still. So I can dump text to printers trough the raw printing port, if sending text trough ipp I need to convert to rasterfile first.
I had read about that years ago. I'm sure my HP does support it. But that is not through network so not relevant to IPP in this case.
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You are right in that converting text to graphics require a lot of information of fonts used etc.. And f.ex printing from notepad I haven’t found a way to retrieve font information. So my plan is to just use a predefined font and size at the moment. I am using IntuitionText for converting to bitmap, which makes the work easier for me.
To my knowledge NotePad would just dump text to the printer through the driver. You could likely find out by extracting it from the prefs file it uses. But that limits it to NotePad only so other text editors printing won't use it. There's ways to find default font. I know the non-proportional default font is in GfxBase->DefaultFont after asking around, which is used by the CLI.
IntuitionText is probably the best way. I've used that to grab text sizes when calculating a layout. Text() function could be more direct but Gfx is made for bitplanes while Intuition can be used for pixmaps transparently. It can also provide a default font. But for single colour printing a bitmap may actually help. If PCLm supported basic text you could have just encapsulated it inside a basic PDF, but it looks like it has the same raster limitation.
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Most ipp printers I have used, does not support PS, but the formats they usually support is pwg-raster and jpeg formats.
PS would have been accepted by earlier printers over direct connection. IIRC PS was supported before PDF. As PS was suited for being a printer PDL while PDF was suited to viewing documents on screen.
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If GS this is updated trough enhancer that would be great, and then I probably haven’t installed it, because my version of GS sometimes fails converting pdf’s.
That would create a dependence on Enhancer but these days some OS components in the OS4.0 days are now depreciated and moved into Enhancer from OS4.1.
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When testing and prigramming this printer device this is for me what looks like is happening:When printing from AmiPDF or AmiGS it sends command to GS trough amiga_printer device of GS and communicates trough Exec msg, GS creates graphics trough printer.device which then again is sent to the selecter printer driver. This driver decides what to do with with the graphics, in my case it is converted to raster format, this will then be transferred to a new device, in my case airprint.device this device sends it to printer in the correct format.
Ah yes, I recall using AmiPS and AmiGS to print. They aren't very well integrated in the OS. Well, an add on really. The Amiga printer system is very old. It works backwards to how things work today, as you need to manually select and install the driver. And the printer device API has no concept of what print job is. I found this out when developing my HP_Photosmart driver based on the HP printer source. I had to work around it somehow as clients tended to send discrete dumps to the printer device, so most printouts were writes of various data.
It's going back years but I recall some things about AmiGS/AmiPDF and just checked then to refresh myself. So you could chose Workbench driver or custom driver and direct device. Workbench driver would go through printer device but other drivers which included PS, PDF, images and specific printers are sent to DOS device. It defaulted to PAR: but that was rather obsolete by then. PAR was old, lol. I had some alternate called USBPRT: or something that diverted to usbprinter.device. So it sent it to the printer direct as possible without involving printer device. A NETPRT: or AIRPRT: could be conceived in the same way. AmiGS and AmiPDF are really just facades for the ghostsscript command. The way they work is rather sloppy as they invoke a CLI command to do their dirty work. That may be acceptable on an OS like Linux where it lives on CLI commands, since it wasn't designed as a desktop OS; but AmigaOS is more integrated like Windows, and there should be a library acting as driver to handle it. It was a bit of a hack and the interface was messy with needing to deal with old DOS devices.
For a number of years I wanted to write a PSPRT: DOS driver. This would have accepted PS as input but would have rasterized the output to a non-PS printer. So it would be a PS to PRT converter you could say using printer device. It would have used ghostsscript command to convert PS to a raster so would have been a bit of a hack in the same way. But I never got around to it. A few word processors could output PS and there is the Workbench PS driver. So it looks like my printer supports stripped-PDF. That's useful, but still not much sends PDF on Amiga, so would need converting from graphics to PDF I would think.
@Hypex if I remember right, Turboprint comes with a PS: device that invoke gs with the selected printer driver. In the Turboprint prefs there is a PS tab with the command to print when some program write on the PS: device
Ah yes, I recall using AmiPS and AmiGS to print. They aren't very well integrated in the OS. Well, an add on really. The Amiga printer system is very old. It works backwards to how things work today, as you need to manually select and install the driver.
What do mean by "backwards"? Is it because when adding a new printer, one has to put a printer driver in DEVS:Printers first, and will then be able to use the printer, instead of having an "add printer" GUI that lets you first select a "bonjour" printer and then select the appropriate driver?
Regarding the very old printer system, how should a concept for a new printer system look like?
Maybe adopting CUPS will be the easiest way? [OT]Btw, Is there any OS4 development going on anyway? And wasn't an update to the Enhancer software supposed to be released around 2023 christmas time or first quarter 2024?[/OT]
On the other hand, if AirPrint.device is going to work "driverless" that would solve most problems, right?
AFAIK the OS4.1FE printer system is on par with the OS3.2.2.1 one, so it is not limited to 4096 Colors anymore?
@mcleppa
I'm not sure I understand this, will AirPrint.device work similarly to how it works on current mainstream systems, i.e. will there be no need for a dedicated printer driver to put in DEVS:Printers for each specific printer model? (assuming the printer supports AirPrint per se). I suppose, that at least, in addition to the DEVS:airprint.device there must be something along the lines of a "DEVS:Printers/Airprinter"?
Anyway, great work you started there, thank you very much! Should you need an additional beta tester, I'd be happy to help!
I'm not sure I understand this, will AirPrint.device work similarly to how it works on current mainstream systems, i.e. will there be no need for a dedicated printer driver to put in DEVS:Printers for each specific printer model? (assuming the printer supports AirPrint per se). I suppose, that at least, in addition to the DEVS:airprint.device there must be something along the lines of a "DEVS:Printers/Airprinter"?
Yes, that is right. Airprint will search network for compatible printers ( at the moment only ipp printers ) which will be added to AirPrint and saved. When you want to print, your selected printer will be used. DEVS:airprint.device, DEVS:Printers/AIRPRINT and the utility AirPrint itself should take care of the rest.
First, lol. Good one. He is also one of my favourite characters.
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That PSPRT: device would have been great!
Thanks. Yes would have. Suppose I could still look into it.
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What do mean by "backwards"? Is it because when adding a new printer, one has to put a printer driver in DEVS:Printers first, and will then be able to use the printer, instead of having an "add printer" GUI that lets you first select a "bonjour" printer and then select the appropriate driver?
Yeah, pretty much, but even going deeper. So these days, when you add a printer, using USB as an example, you plug it in and the printer is auto detected. A dialog comes up and it determines the driver for the printer and activates it for you. Usually downloading it.
Now, if we take the net out of it, we can even use examples like Windows where it does the same but looked for drivers on the Windows disc, or another disc inserted.
On AmigaOS, not only is the design old, but it comes with a limited subset of drivers. Ancient really. They've removed some newer stuff from OS4 but left all the older drivers in. Has anyone really connected an MPS1250 EpsonX in IBM mode to an OS4 machine in the last 20 years?
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Regarding the very old printer system, how should a concept for a new printer system look like?
I'd start with the user experience. Now not much can be done about the drivers. But it would be good if a generic GDI or PCLGUI driver was offered. Something that updates the drivers to printers in this century. HP even have sources for their drivers that I've looked into retrofitting into the existing HP_CYMK Amiga driver code.
Drivers aside, a daemon of sorts that picks up USB devices would be good, which already exists for storage devices so detecting printers should be just as possible. Even without that, Printer Prefs could scan for a printer over various transport layers, display a list to pick from and suggested driver. Or select one to activate and copy in if needed. But leave out parallel.device, usbprinter.device and all that technical stuff. It's called a user interface, not a developer interface. They need to shake that off. Another backwards step, going from a user oriented OS to a developer oriented OS. No user should need or know what device driver API to use. Forcing users to learn programming terms is a red flag you are programming the OS wrong. Even Linux wouldn't do that on the desktop surface level
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Maybe adopting CUPS will be the easiest way? [OT]Btw, Is there any OS4 development going on anyway? And wasn't an update to the Enhancer software supposed to be released around 2023 christmas time or first quarter 2024?[/OT]
That's been suggested in the past. The problem is CUPS is designed for a different OS driver API system. Though, by contrast, AHI does have some Linux based drivers used as basis for AHI driver. So there is the printer API and then the driver API. A device API using library API for drivers. Either printer API would need to be wrapped around CUPS core and drivers. Or drivers would need adapting with CUPS driver code to work with native printer API. Best would be broad drivers to cover a range of models. Such as broad HP drivers that can drive a broad range of printers. Of course, the driver being able to communicate with the printer, so it could determine model and features would be good to configure a run time driver model adapting itself when loaded.
One thing I will say needed is jobs. The printer API and clients have no concept of print jobs. I touched on this earlier. Given you've got old programs (or new) that write random data to the printer API, it would be hard to add that concept. By random I mean a reset command or writing lines out at a time. There's nothing for starting and stopping a page. Even opening and closing the printer device won't do it, as that can happen, while a program writes different data to the printer in one session.
OS4 development is still happening. Just not in the printer department. Enhancer had some update in August 2022 and another is due this year.
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On the other hand, if AirPrint.device is going to work "driverless" that would solve most problems, right?
For drivers it would, yes. Of course, driverless is a fallacy really, since there is still data that needs encoding in a specific format. Given it could be PDF or JPEG or URF makes no difference really, as it's still a data format. But being a common format that can be generated easier does make a difference.
IPP over USB would be good. But since my printer is on the network, I can still reach it from my X1000.
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AFAIK the OS4.1FE printer system is on par with the OS3.2.2.1 one, so it is not limited to 4096 Colors anymore?
No I certainly hope not. 1985 wants its colours back. Ha. IIRC it's been 24 bit since OS3.9 and OS3.1 on AGA should have fixed that.
if I remember right, Turboprint comes with a PS: device that invoke gs with the selected printer driver. In the Turboprint prefs there is a PS tab with the command to print when some program write on the PS: device
It does comes with a PS interpreter. I suppose this is for programs printing as PS format which are then converted by the printer driver. Unless printing as PS document is useful I thought just using a direct driver would be best.
It's still updated for Linux. I don't know how up to date the driver are but it's still newer than the Amiga version. The Amiga version cost 30 euros more. Strange situation. Technically they still support the Amiga as they still sell it. But it looks like abandon ware as the newest printers supported are about 15 years old.
I received from mcieppa Airprint and it does not work with my Canon TS3300 printer do I need to configure something on the printer?
Airprint sees my printer communicates with it (I think) and when I want to print a file a window appears, write lots of things and nothing comes out of my printer.
I have those outputs in shell to see what happens during printing, I need you to send me the output so I can see what is happening. please send it on mail.
Is there an option to add a device to either AirPrint or AirScan by specifying an IP address rather than using the search feature? For example my printer is perfectly accessible from my Amiga but on a different subnet, so the search function doesn't 'see' it when doing the search for a device add.
-- eliyahu
"Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this is unreal."
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