Comment 1 for bug 2028054

Generally, python-reportlab is used only by HPLIP's utilities, not by the printer and scanner drivers by themselves.

It is used by hp-scan to convert image files of scanned pages into PDF files and by hp-sendfax to generate fax cover sheets.

Most users do not care as they use simple-scan or XSane for scanning. As HPLIP's scanner driver is a SANE driver all these frontends work, and probably also more reliable than HP's tool.

hp-sendfax is very really used, probably already because fax is only rarely used nowadays. at most places it got already completely replaced by other electronic communication means.

Also use of HPLIP at all is diminishing as modern HP printers and multi-function devices support driverless (IPP) printing and (eSCL) scanning.

hp-sendfax is in hplip-gui which is in Universe.

hp-scan is a command line tool but not necessarily needed, there is also scanimage of SANE, so one should check whether the binary package "hplip" is actually needed by sane-hpaio and/or printer-driver-hpcups and if not, demote it to Universe.

In addition, from Ubuntu 23.10 printing will be provided by the CUPS Snap and Printer Application Snaps, which makes printer-driver-hpcups not needed any more, and so also subject to be moved to Universe.

So for me it looks like that we can move most of HPLIP to Universe as practically only sane-hpaio is needed to support scanners (and sane-hpaio will also get removed in favor of Snaps in a later version of Ubuntu).