pyppd 0.4.9

A CUPS PostScript Printer Driver's compressor and generator

pyppd is a CUPS PPD generator. It holds an compressed archive of PPDs, which can be listed and retrieved only when needed by CUPS, saving disk space.

Instalation

To install pyppd, you can use:

# pip install pyppd

Or download the source package, uncompress, and run as root:

# python setup.py install

It depends on Python 2.x (http://www.python.org) and XZ Utils (http://tukaani.org/xz/).

Usage

At first, you have to create a PPD archive. For such, put all PPDs (they might be gzipped) you want to add in the archive inside a single folder (which can have subfolders), then run:

$ pyppd /path/to/your/ppd/folder

It’ll create pyppd-ppdfile in your current folder. You can test it by running:

$ ./pyppd-ppdfile list

And, for reading a PPD from the archive, simply do:

$ ./pyppd-ppdfile cat pyppd-ppdfile:MY-PPD-FILE.PPD

For CUPS to be able to use your newly-created archive, copy pyppd-ppdfile to /usr/lib/cups/driver/ and you’re done.

The generated pyppd-ppdfile can be arbitrarily renamed, so that more than one packed repository can be installed on one system. This can be useful if you need a better performance, be it in time or memory usage. Note that also the PPD URIs will follow the new name:

$ ./pyppd-ppdfile list

pyppd-ppdfile:LasterStar/LaserStar-XX100.ppd

$ mv pyppd-ppdfile laserstar

$ ./laserstar list

laserstar:LaserStar/LaserStar-XX100.ppd

Contributors

• Till Kamppeter - Original idea, mentoring and feedback. User #0.

• Hin-Tak Leung - Lots of technical suggestions.

• Flávio Ribeiro and Diógenes Fernandes - Refactorings and general Python’s best practices tips.

• Google’s OSPO - Initial funding at GSoC 2010.

Issues

• Add unit tests.

• When testing if the PPD generated from the *Product line already exists in a *1284DeviceID line, we do a case-sensitive test. I think it should be case- insensitive.

• Generate manpage.