Support PDF print workflow for PDF-capable printers

[Schlomo Schapiro]

I have a HP Officejet Pro X476dw printer that supports PDF printing. The PPD included in hplip 3.14.3 on Ubuntu 14.04 is a Postscript PDD which converts all print jobs to Postscript before sending them to the printer.

hplip should also ship PDF-based PPDs to support the PDF print workflow that is default in recent CUPS versions. That way there would be less conversions on each print job.

[Johannes Meixner (jsmeix)]

Only FYI:
See the related issues
https://answers.launchpad.net/hplip/+question/256131
and
https://bugs.linuxfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1234

[Adam Goode (agoode)]

This should be straightforward for HP to support. I was able to test it out with good results on my printer by following these steps:

1. copy /usr/lib/cups/filter/hpps to hppdf
2. change ENTER LANGUAGE=POSTSCRIPT to ENTER LANGUAGE=PDF
3. edit the ppd and change cupsFilter to use pdf and the hppdf filter

This was only a proof of concept, but it did work. A proper implementation would need to add the proper cupsFilter lines to all the PPDs and also provide a better (non-duplicated) version of hppdf. But it is possible.

[Schlomo Schapiro (sschapiro)]

Cool! How do we get HP to actually work on this? Anybody here working for HP?

[Suma Byrappa (suma-byrappa)]

Hello,

This is on our list. We will update you as and when there is a progress on this.

Thanks & Regards,
Suma

[Schlomo Schapiro (sschapiro)]

A year has passed - any news on supporting native PDF printing?

[Paul Menzel (paulmenzel)]

Hi. Do you have an update on this issue?

[Schlomo Schapiro (sschapiro)]

I have the impression that nobody cares about this topic or knows how to change something here.