Workflow Of Driverless Printing

The workflow of driverless printing is always the same-:

1. The printer advertises itself by DNS-SD, with a summary of its most important capability information (especially also its PDLs and a one-line-string super summary in case of AirPrint printers) in its DNS-SD record.

2. Clients find these printers via DNS-SD.

3. The client polls the full capabilities info from the printer sending a get-printer-attributes IPP request. The printer returns a long list of info, especially paper sizes and types, unprintable margins, resolutions, input trays, finishers, quality settings, all user-settable options etc..

4. CUPS or cups-browsed on the client generate PPD files from this info and create print queues for each printer.

5. The print dialogs of the applications show the printers and allow access to all the user-settable options.

6. The user prints a job. The PDF from the application is turned into one of the PDLs which the printer supports by cups-filters. The settings selected by the user are passed along with the job as IPP attributes.

7. The printer prints the job and thanks to IPP the status can be observed, toner levels and any errors can get reported to the client.

8. If the printer is shut down, its queue will get automatically removed. So no clutter of print queues as souvenir of all the networks you have visited.