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 ]