path: root/README

Foomatic 4.0.17
===============


foomatic-filters
----------------

Filter scripts used by the printer spoolers to convert the incoming
PostScript data into the printer's native format using a
printer/driver specific, but spooler-independent PPD file.

http://www.openprinting.org/

This README contains mainly info for developers. See the file USAGE if
you want to know how to use Foomatic.


Copying
-------

This package is free software and can be redistributed and/or modified
under the terms of the GNU General Public License; either version 2 of
the License, or (at your option) any later version.


Authors
-------

Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter@gmail.com>
Lars Uebernickel <larsuebernickel@gmx.de>
Grant Taylor <gtaylor@picante.com>
Helge Blischke <h.blischke@acm.org>


Bugs
----

If you spot a data error or any other bug, please report it on the
OpenPrinting bug tracking system:

http://bugs.linux-foundation.org/

Choose "OpenPrinting" as the product and "foomatic-filters" as the component.


Intro
-----

For getting Foomatic PPD files for this version, go to

http://www.openprinting.org/

See the README file of "foomatic-db-engine" for a (more or less)
complete overview of Foomatic.

User discussion happens on:

http://forums.openprinting.org/list.php?34

Developer mailing list:

https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/printing-foomatic


Supported printing systems/spoolers
-----------------------------------

CUPS     - Common Unix Printing System (http://www.cups.org/)
SOLARIS  - Solaris LP (lpsched)
LPD      - Line Printer Daemon (Does this have a home page anywhere?)
LPRng    - LPR - New Generation (https://sourceforge.net/projects/lprng/)
GNUlpr   - An enhanced LPD (http://sf.net/projects/lpr, development stopped)
PPR      - Page PRinter spooler (http://ppr.sourceforge.net/, development
           stopped)
PDQ      - Print, Don't Queue (http://pdq.sf.net/, development stopped)
CPS      - Coherent Printing System (http://www.tww.cx/cps.php, development
           stopped)
---      - Direct, spooler-less printing (http://www.openprinting.org/)

As most of the supported printing systems are not actively developed
any more, support for them will be removed in a later version of
foomatic-rip. This can even happen before 5.x. For now their support
is deprecated and there were only few tests done during the
development of foomatic-rip 4.x. So be prepared that there are bugs
(patches welcome). Testing were mostly done with the de-facto standard
CUPS and spooler-less.


What is in this package?
------------------------

This package contains only two programs, its man pages, and a test
suite. The programs arw foomatic-rip and beh (Backend Error
Handler). foomatic-rip is the main
PostScript/PDF-to-printer's-native-language filter and beh is a CUPS
backend wrapper for fine-tuning how a CUPS queue should behave on
failure of its backend.

foomatic-rip works with all spoolers and always uses PPD files for
printer/driver capabilities info. Manufacturer-supplied PPDs (in most
cases of of PostScript printers) can be used, too.

foomatic-rip is now written in C, in contrary to Perl in Foomatic
3.x. This allows foomatic-rip to link directly with
libraries. foomatic-rip currently uses only the standard
libraries. The functionality of the former foomatic-gswrapper is now
integrated into foomatic-rip, so the foomatic-gswrapper is not needed
any more.

beh is still written in Perl and does not need anything else than a
Perl interpreter. It is only for use with CUPS.

The test/ subdirectory contains a test suite, originally developed for
the distribution compliance tests of the LSB. It also serves as a
regression test for further development of foomatic-rip. To execute
the test, go into that directory and run "./testfoomaticrip" as root
(as normal user the test series #13, CUPS queues, will not work) and
you test the foomatic-rip installed on your system. You can modify the
testing configuration by the variables in the beginning of the
script. The test suite will not get installed with the "make install"
command.

The main directory contains the source code of foomatic-rip, beh, and
the infrastructure for building and installing the package. It also
contains the documentation.


Dependencies
------------

To build this package you need a C compiler, and its standard libraries.

To run beh a Perl interpreter (5.6.0 and newer) is needed.

To connect to remote printers in non-CUPS printing environments, you
need additional connectivity software (as "rlpr", "nc", "smbspool',
...).


How does it work?
-----------------

foomatic-rip is a filter which takes PostScript or PDF (and for
non-CUPS operation also certain other formats which will get converted
to PostScript) from standard input and translates it to the printer's
native language. The resulting data is usually directed to standard
output, but depending on the spooler abnd its configuration it can
also be directed to elsewhere. The information how to do this
translation it gets from a PPD file, from command line options,
environment variables, and spooler configuration files.

foomatic-rip does the following steps to do its work:


Spooler auto-detection

At first, foomatic-rip reads its command line and a certain assortment
of environment variables. With this information it determines from
which spooler it was called, since every spooler calls its filter(s)
with different command lines and different information supplied via
environment variables.


Gathering all information to execute the print job

Next step after figuring out what the spooler is, is collecting the
information about the print job which was not found in the first
step. Now the knowledge of which spooler is used is taken into account
for interpreting the information.


Reading the PPD file

In one of the previous steps we have found the name of the PPD file
assigned to the print queue currently in use. Now the PPD file is read
to get all information needed to build the renderer's (Usually, the
renderer is Ghostscript, when no renderer is needed, as for a
PostScript printer, "cat" is used) command line, the available
options, their default values, and how to apply them. After having
parsed the PPD file we have a renderer command line and a list of
options with the range of possible settings and a default setting. For
LPRng, LPD, GNUlpr, and spooler-less printing we get also the
so-called postpipe here, defining a shell command line into which
foomatic-rip should direct its output. If no postpipe is found, the
output data goes to standard output. The postpipe allows to print to
destinations which are not directly supported by the spooler.


Applying user-supplied settings

All option settings which the user has supplied on the command line
are checked whether they are valid (option exists, choice in range)
and then applied to the list of default settings, replacing the
defaults by the values given by the user. The options not mentioned on
the command line keep their default values from the PPD file.


Check for the "docs" option

foomatic-rip accepts a special option which is not defined in the PPD
file, the "docs" option. When the user supplies it, he wants to print
a listing of all options available for the printer/driver combo in
use. So the incoming data on standard input is discarded and a
sub-process for generating the option listing in plain text form is
launched. Standard input of the main process is connected to the
output of the sub-process. Now the main process behaves as the option
listing would be the job which the user has sent.


Print files

With some spoolers the jobs to be printed are supplied in files.
In this case we close standard input and open the file on the
standard input handler. This way the following steps read from the
file instead of from standard input. The rest of the foomatic-rip
process is repeated for every input file, to print them one after the
other.


Raw queue

When we have a raw queue, all the rest of the incoming data is
directly passed to standard output or to the postpipe now. The
following steps will be omitted then.


Print the job

Jobs are usually expected to be sent in PostScript or PDF format
(handling of other formats in non-CUPS environment will be shown
later). PostScript is the standard format for print jobs under Unix
and Linux for many years. Currently, we are on the way to move to PDF
as standard format
(http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/PDF_as_Standard_Print_Job_Format).
Therefore we accept both formats. In most cases Ghostscript is the
renderer which understands both formats equally. So we do not convert
PDF to PostScript if either the renderer command line starts with "gs
..." as then Ghostscript is the renderer and no pre-processing of
incoming PostScript happens or we have a dedicated commad line
prototype for PDF defined in the PPD file
("*FoomaticRIPCommandLinePDF:" keyword). In addition there must be no
option at all which is implemented by inserting active PostScript code
(not only comments starting with "%") into a PostScript input data
stream.  If these criteria are not fulfilled, the PDF job will be
converted to PostScript.

After all the preparation, and if the job is PostScript the data
stream is examined for traces of option settings supposed to be
applied to the renderer's command line or to the JCL (Job Command
Language, for example PJL) header which is sent to the printer before
the renderer's output is sent.  PPD-aware applications and spoolers
stuff option settings directly into the file, they do not necessarily
send PPD options by the command line. There is also stuffed in
PostScript code to apply option settings given by the command line of
the printing command ("lpr", "lp", ...) and to set the defaults given
in the PPD file.

Examination strategy: We read lines from standard input until the
first %%Page: comment appears and save them as @psheader. This is the
page-independent header part of the PostScript file. The PostScript
interpreter (renderer) must execute this part once before rendering
any assortment of pages. Then pages can be printed in any arbitrary
selection or order. All option settings we find here will be collected
in the default option set for the RIP (Raster Image Processor,
renderer) command line.

Now the pages will be read and sent to the renderer, one after the
other. Every page is read into memory until the %%EndPageSetup comment
appears (or a certain amount of lines was read in the case that there
is no %%EndPageSetup). So we can get option settings only valid for
this page. If we have such settings we set them in the modified
command set for this page.

If the renderer is not running yet (first page) we start it with the
command line built from the current modified command set and send the
first page to it, in the end we leave the renderer running and keep
input and output pipes open, so that it can accept further pages. If
the renderer is still running from the previous page and the current
modified command set is the same as the one for the previous page, we
send the page. If the command set is different, we close the renderer,
re-start it with the command line built from the new modified command
set, send the header again, and then the page.

After the last page the trailer (%%Trailer) is sent.

The output pipe of this program stays open all the time so that the
spooler does not assume that the job has finished when the renderer is
re-started.

Non DSC-conforming documents will be read until a certain line number
is reached. Options for the renderer's command line or the JCL header
appearing later will be ignored. This means that option settings in
the page headers will not be taken into account.

If options are implemented by PostScript code supposed to be stuffed
into the job's PostScript data we stuff the code for all these options
into our job data, So all default settings made in the PPD file (the
user can have edited the PPD file to change them) are taken care of
and command line options get also applied. To give priority to
settings made by applications we insert the options's code in the
beginnings of their respective sections, so that sommething, which is
already inserted, gets executed after our code. Missing sections are
automatically created. In non-DSC-conforming files we insert the
option code in the beginning of the file. This is the same policy as
used by the "pstops" filter of CUPS.

If CUPS is the spooler, the option settings were already inserted by
the "pstops" filter (both PPD defaults and user-supplied options), so
we don't insert them again. The only thing we do is correcting
settings of numerical options when they were set to a value not
available as choice in the PPD file, As "pstops" does not support
"real" numerical options, it sees these settings as an invalid choice
and stays with the default setting. In this case we correct the
setting in the first occurence of the option's code, as this one is
the one added by CUPS, later occurences come from applications and
should not be touched.

If the input data is PDF then we do not search for options in the data
stream nor do we try to insert settings, as this is not forseen by
PDF. As told above, data in PDF format is only passed on as PDF if
there are no options in the PPD file which are implemented by
PostScript code to be embedded in the data stream. All options are
command line or JCL options. If there are page-dependent option
changes we always restart the renderer with the changed JCL and
command line options. We tell the renderer by command line options
which pages he has to print.

If we are in a non-CUPS environment and the input is neither
PostScript nor PDF (if there is no "%!" after $maxlinestopsstart
lines) a file conversion filter (input format -> PostScript) will
automatically be applied to the incoming data, so that we will process
the resulting PostScript here. This way we have always PostScript data
here and so we can apply the printer/driver features described in the
PPD file. For the file conversion filter two subprocesses are started,
the task of the first one is to pass the already buffered lines into
the filter and then to continue reading standard input (without
parsing the data) to pass the rest of the job to the filter. The
second subprocess is the filter itself, getting its standard input
from the first subprocess and the giving its standard output to the
main process. This way the main process has again PostScript as its
standard input.

Supported file conversion filters are "a2ps", "enscript", "mpage", and
spooler-specific filters. All filters convert plain text to
PostScript, "a2ps" also other formats. The conversion filter is always
used when one prints the documentation pages, as they are created as
plain text, when CUPS is the spooler "pstops" is executed after the
filter so that the default option settings from the PPD file and
CUPS-specific options as N-up get applied. On regular printouts one
gets always PostScript or PDF when CUPS is the spooler and PostScript
in the case of PPR, so the filter is only used for regular printouts
under LPD, LPRng, GNUlpr, PDQ, or without spooler.

The main process keeps always parsing the PostScript input or feeding
through the PDF input, it launches the renderer in one subprocess and
launches an additional subprocess for bracketing the renderer's output
with the JCL commands and putting the resulting data to standard
output or to the postpipe.


Overview of the subprocesses
----------------------------

To do the filtering without loading the whole file into memory we work
on a data stream, we read the data line by line, analyse it to decide what
filters to use and start the filters if we have found out which we need.
We buffer the data only as long as we didn't determine which filters to
use for this piece of data and with which options.

foomatic-rip splits into up to 6 parallel processes to do the whole
filtering (listed in the order of the data flow):

   KID0: Generate documentation pages (only jobs with "docs" option)
   KID2: Put together already read data and current input stream for
         feeding into the file conversion filter (only non-PostScript
         and "docs" jobs)
   KID1: Run the file conversion filter to convert non-PostScript
         input into PostScript (only non-PostScript and "docs" jobs)
   MAIN: Prepare the job auto-detecting the spooler, reading the PPD,
         extracting the options from the command line, and parsing
         the job data itself. It analyses the job data to check
         whether it is PostScript and starts KID1/KID2 if not, it
         also stuffs PostScript code from option settings into the
         PostScript data stream. It starts the renderer (KID3/KID4)
         as soon as it knows its command line and restarts it when
         page-specific option settings need another command line
         or different JCL commands.
   KID3: The rendering process. In most cases Ghostscript, "cat"
         for native PostScript printers with their manufacturer's
         PPD files.
   KID4: Put together the JCL commands and the renderer's output
         and send all that either to STDOUT or pipe it into the
         command line defined with $postpipe.