CUPS Support: the Most Important Module in KDEPrint
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CUPS Support: the Most Important Module in KDEPrint

KDEPrint contains a module for CUPS. CUPS, the “Common UNIX® Printing System” (http://www.cups.org/), is the most advanced, powerful and flexible of all print subsystems on UNIX® and other UNIX®-like operating systems. It is still quite new on the horizon, but is based on IPP, the Internet Printing Protocol, the newly emerging standard for the future of network printing. CUPS is clearly the print system of choice for Michael Goffioul, the principal KDEPrint developer.

Experienced KDE users may already be familiar with Michael's utilities qtcups and kups (co-developed with Jean-Eric Cuendet). These were, up until now, the graphical GUI front ends for CUPS with a strong relation to KDE.

qtcups and kups — The Predecessors

Both utilities are probably still widely used. For those not familiar with them, here are brief explanations.

qtcups was a graphical front end for the lp or lpr print commands as installed by CUPS. Using qtcups opened a dialog. This dialog let you comfortably select your printer and the print job options. qtcups worked from the command line, or from within applications, when the application in question had a configurable print command.

kups was a graphical wrapper to do the administration tasks for your CUPS server, and the CUPS daemon at the heart of it. You could add, delete, modify, configure, start, and stop printers. You could cancel, delete, move, stop and restart print jobs, and you could change the settings of the daemon, start, stop, and restart it.

KDEPrint — The Heir

The CUPS Module in KDEPrint now contains all (and more) functions that were provided by qtcups and kups in former KDE versions.

Instead of qtcups you can now use the kprinter command. And in place of kups you will probably use kcmshell printers from now on.

The KDEPrint module for CUPS also lets you fully administer the print subsystem, just like kups did before. It can start, stop and configure your CUPS daemon. It can also start, stop, add and delete “printers” (i.e. printer queues) and printer “instances”. Printer instances are printer queues that point to the same physical output device but with a different default setting of print options.

kprinter — Graphical Print Command

KDEPrint's CUPS module gives you access to a “graphical print command”, like qtcups did before.

Use kprinter in any application, even a non-KDE application, that lets you configure your print command. Examples of these are Netscape® and StarOffice, but not most pre-KDE 2.2 programs.

A screenshot how to use the new kprinter print command instead of the old-fashioned lpr... Of course you need to have kprinter in your $PATH, or give the full path in the dialog; e.g. /opt/kde/bin/kprinter. Netscape® will remember this and with further print jobs you will get the kprinter dialog to configure your printouts.


Here's a screenshot showing how to use the new
kprinter print command
instead of the old-fashioned lp or
lpr in Netscape®.

You can also use kprinter from the command line and see the resulting dialog box pop up:


Screenshot showing use of the kprinter command
from the command line.

Note

Just make sure you give at least the file to be printed from the command line as well: kprinter /usr/share/doc/packages/cups/sam.pdf. This will hand over the CUPS Software Administrator Manual to the kprinter dialog, which will then pop up with the default printer pre-selected.

To pre-select a specific printer from the command line, use the -d option, e.g.: kprinter -d DANKAcolorC2000 /home/kurt/linuxtag2001-paper.ps. You can still de-select the printer DANKAcolorC2000 and choose a different one.

You cannot however call kprinter without a print file and hope to open a file selection dialog box from the kprinter window. This is a feature that will be implemented only in the next version.

Using kprinter you are able to “ring all the bells and blow all the whistles” of your printer. You will need a device-specific so-called PPD (PostScript® Printer Description) to enable CUPS to make this nice tandem team do this for you. Read more about this in the section called “Device Dependent Print Options”.

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