[IPP] Fwd: IPP Question [Driverless Printing]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ira McDonald <blueroofmusic@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 7:39 PM
Subject: Re: IPP Question
To: John Madden <jpmsparks@yahoo.com>, Ira McDonald <blueroofmusic@gmail.com>,
Michael Sweet <msweet@msweet.org>

Hi John,

I am forwarding your questions to Mike Sweet, who wrote the first
Driverless printing in Apple Air Print and later the PWG IPP Everywhere
standard.

It's not really driverless, there's just one standard driver in each OS.
Dropping tens of thousands of legacy vendor drivers.

Over to Mike.

Cheers,
- Ira

On Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 7:26 PM John Madden <jpmsparks@yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> Mr McDonald,
>
> I was hoping you could help me understand how an IPP printer manages to
> be "driverless" of sorts. My understanding is that data is sent to the
> printer as a series of bytes via a POST HTTP field
>
> except using port 631 versus 80 or 8080. Reading the CUPS API set, I can
> also see that the MIME type is typically required to print a document,
> I'll assume to let the printer know what sort of
>
> document or format the byte field represent, i.e. txt, pdf, PWG Raster,
> etc. So on a computer, say a Windows computer printing an Excel
> worksheet - or even a Linux computer printing an LibreOffice
>
> document - the OS would convert the screen representing the document
> into a PWG Rasterized byte buffer and send this to the IPP printer. At
> this point, since the printer understands the
>
> PWG Raster format, can the printer then start the conversion of the byte
> field to a printed output?  I'm trying to wrap my head around how
> various document from various platforms formats get
>
> printed without a driver. Was the inclusion of native pwg raster and pdf
> processing in Mopria the game changer as far as driverless printing?
>
>
>
> Excuse my questions, but there isn't a whole lot out there detailing
> this process so thank you for your time on this!
>
>