Does Morphozone bounty system work? I think about taking printer bounty but i don't know it anybody takes care of Morphzone bounties. Maybe i should ask pampers to open bounty on morphos.pl.

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rzookol

I have sent an email to the bounty admins.

> Does Morphozone bounty system work? [...] i don't know it anybody takes care
> of Morphzone bounties.

Seems the answer is 'yes', judging by that thread:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=8976&forum=32

The Bounty systems works and bounties are waiting for coders

@zukow
If you are interested in the printer bounty, you can find some generell
informations here:
https://morph.zone/modules/news/article_storyid_1528.html
Then please read the bounty rules:
http://www.pegasosforum.de/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=3590
(This is because the printer bounty was founded at pegasosforum...)

I will have a look at this thread regular or you can write to:
bounty-team@amigaclubhamburg.de

Actually I (still) don´t see a point in setting up / using a bounty for printing.

You can go into a printer shop and get a printer for MorphOS without any problem.

All you need to do is check if it supports PCL5 and/or Postscript.

I frequently check printer tests in a german magazin and at least 50 to 70% of the tested printer work with MorphOS.

All this bounty would create is support for the cheap crappy printers you stumble over in any super market. Also the bounty maintainer should be aware of that once a bounty is done, any new printer will fail instantly unless someone adds support for it.

The entire CUPS or whatever port would be used gets more and more obsolete. Mobile devices using iOS and Android already support airprint and many new printers also already support air print (ipp).

This is basically a simple "send a PDF file over network to a printer" protocol with some additional "find any printer in network" protocol. This is also known as driverless printing as the host system just creates a PDF document and sends it over.

Driverless is the key here. This is what we always wanted.

MorphOS already comes with all stuff needed to create/read PDF files and several applications already support pdf printing direct or over Ghostscript.

In addition to that many printer have SD card slot, so you can even save the print job PDF onto such card and plug the SD card into the printer.

Noone is able to maintain 40 different printers on his own. Even when a CUPS/whatever driver gets ported, as soon as there is a problem, the blame is on the guy who ported the drivers but did not test it. Testing is simply impossiable as each year >50 printer models go into the market and the same amount will get out of production. It is impossible to deliver quality work for all of them without owning them.

My longtherm idea was to implement ipp support into netprinter, so any application could send their pdf to e.g. NPDF: and done. Unfortunatly proper ipp requires some features within the network stack and their drivers, which are not available by now.

Geit

[ Edited by geit 31.01.2013 - 00:05 ]

> Unfortunatly proper ipp requires some features within the network stack and
> their drivers, which are not available by now.

Will the new NetStack provide those required features?

@ Geit

your point of view is fineto me, very good approach , though how would color management be handled? To me, if I print something, I want the best possible quality of the printed document and IMHO only ICC support can overcome to this.

Else, I'm trying for quite some time to find a solution and "only" print pdf's, like you proposed, but for a lot of situations like brochure printing (multiple pages with imposition) we would need quite some extented possibilities, like signature imposition, etc.

But if MorphOS would be capable in some way to read the printers capapilities which for a postscript printer are in the PPD file (postscript printer description), and MorphOS could handle input or source icc's as well as output icc's then the quality question as well as all the diffenrent printers and all their features like several trays, etc., would be solved and high quality color printing could be done.

BTW, I use a OKI C9850hdtn printer here, it supports PCL5c, how can I integrate the capapilities of this printer, from A5 to A3Nobi, 5 trays, native 1200x1200 dpi, etc. into MorphOS? (for now I use this printer only with postscript and more or less only through PageStream because this seems the only program which can read/use more or less what is in the PPD.)

Regards
Christoph

@Geit

Making printer system isn't a rocket science and current situation ins't as good as it could be. Postscript printing now == sending raw PS file to printer. You can't set feeder, dpi, pagesize etc (as RMS said). We don't have gui for it now also (even AmigaOS 3.x has it).

So PPD parser + postscript preprocessor would be useful to current situation. That's first part of my TODO (nearly finished).

2nd problem - printing on cheap printers. Probably You are right and in near future everybody will use PDF printing, but now i have Samsung CLP300 (color laser) and can't use it with MorphOS so:
1) i'll add CUPS rasterformat decoder/encoder to Reggae (written from scratch) + some filters to do dithering + color management. Everything will be done as Reggae chain.
2) CUPS drivers are in fact simple programs which convert Cups raster file to printer format. CUPS raster format has two options Turboprint doesn't have: mask for text (to print text in black - useful for color printers) and telling printer to print many copies of one page without sending it many times.
3) When having all CUPS raster format infrastucture i can make simplified ghostscript version which converts to CUPS raster (smaller, simpler without all drivers builtin)
4) adding PDF output (using hpdf.library) still can be added


--
rzookol

zukow,
Quote:

You can. Thats done by e.g. the ipad, too.

1. You send out a request for available printers.
2. You receive a list of all printers with their features
3. You present the user the first printer (the last used one, with last used settings, if the printer is still available) and options depending on the printers features and the print job.
4. In most cases you simply press print. Or you select the printer, orientation etc and then print

http://innovate360.de/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/hp-drucker-apple-airprint.jpg
http://static8.businessinsider.com/image/4cf67b8149e2aeb00b020000/airprint.jpg

Thats all it needs.

In fact there are even converters available, which contain a build in cups and provide proper air print/network print, so you can basically convert nearly any printer into a supported printer for MorphOS.

E.g. Recently there was a ipp print server software released for the Raspberry pi. For some basic ipp driver tests, I used my Mac mini as air print interface server, but having a big system running is not the final solution I would like. At least it is good for testing. Using a pi would be one, as I could expand my old hardware for around 40 Euro.

Geit


[ Edited by geit 31.01.2013 - 12:53 ]

rms,
Quote:

Thats the boring part.

You clone the used printer. E.g. TP:printers/HP_Laserjet4.tpp and rename it to OKI_C9850hdtn.tpp. Now you open the file with a text editor and adapt/add all its features.

A while ago several people on PegasosForum worked on this to fix wrong files (mainly mixed colors), so there are probably more people out there, who know how to tweak those files. The point is you cannot test without owning hardware.

You can even grab those files from other TP distrubutions.

Maybe this is an opportunity to set up a users made tp files addon pack. Unfortunatly the MorphOS Team is not allowed to include any further updates.

Geit

[ Edited by geit 31.01.2013 - 13:16 ]

Recently I bought Samsung CLX-3305W. Is that airprinting gonna support some prefs like setting up eco mode and other stuff?

AFAIR yes.

You get all features in a description file and can enable/disable them, when sending the print job pdf.

But since NetStack/drivers do not support MultiCast, this is currently impossible anyway. MultiCast requires more work to implement, so it won´t be there soonish.

Geit

>> Will the new NetStack provide those required features?

> MultiCast requires more work to implement, so it won´t be there soonish.

Pity. Thanks for answering.

For multicast you may try Roadshow
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=576225&postcount=108

Miami (DX?) supports it too, but... meh. In old days I only switched to Miami when I wanted to play Earth 2140 in multiplayer mode, because it needed multicast...

New printing system for MorphOS.. nice :)
http://bounties.morph.zone/bounties/show/12

"Deadline is september 2013"

Zukow must finalise this project before october 2013 ? or the donations stops in the end of september ?

Thanks for your answer.

@Zukow: thanks for taking this project

The deadline was choosen by zukow himself, so i think we can await a first
end-user version of his printing system in september...
Personally i have no problem if it takes two more weeks

Thanks a lot insame for your answer

Insane, bounty page is looking for a css sheet at wiki.morphos-user.com which doesn't exist anymore so bounty page has no css sheet at all and it makes loading that site really slow - any chance to get that fixed?

I am not the webmaster of morphzone or morphos-user.ocm, so i can't
do anything to solve this problem by myself. But i can try to contact
someone who maybe can fix it

Multicast is not really a road blocker. If someone software component would need it, I think it should be relatively easy to add that functionality to the stack. I just didn't look into it since there are other fish to fry.

@pampers
Seems to be fixed

[ Edited by insane 15.02.2013 - 10:20 ]

Yep, thanks for that :)

geit,
Quote:
That's a common myth. There are no cheap printers.

At least if you remember to include at least first ink cartridge replacement in the price (which you definitely should), which you need to replace when you have printed 50% of the bundled cartridge (as they generally come with one that's "half full"). And often a full replacement costs more than the printer itself.

One solution which I think wasn't yet mentioned, you could probably configure a linux system to work as a print server, that "converts" incoming print jobs to a form understood by the printer. Never done that, but perhaps someone else has?

(I don't need to do that, but could give it a try some day)