CUPS 2.1 Is Adding Basic 3D Printer Support

http://www.cups.org/blog.php?L1087

by tomkwok • 11 years ago

86 40 11 years ago

cups.org

joosters2• 11 years ago

...why, was printer software becoming too reliable?

TazeTSchnitzel4• 11 years ago

Why would this addition hurt reliability?

joosters2• 11 years ago

While my comment was a bit glib, new features do have a tendency to introduce complexity & bugs on seemingly entirely unrelated parts of software. If CUPS is going to make a big push on integrating 3d printing, I'd bet you that it causes more than one bug with the normal 2d printing, even if it is a compile-time option.

I just hope that the 3d part of CUPS is easily removable... I'd hate to see it part of the common user experience, CUPS already has a reputation for a complex and bewildering UI as-is.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 11 years ago

This makes more sense than it might first appear. By adding this to CUPS, you can take advantage of its print spooler, filter pipeline, and OS connectivity support (USB, parallel, etc.).

contingencies2• 11 years ago

Also logical is integration with existing program UI dialogs, print to file and other features.

Added support for 3D printers (basic types only, no built-in filters) based on PWG white paper. ... can anyone find the white paper?

Someone• 11 years ago

Possibly http://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/BOFs/3d-printing/wd-apple-ipp3d-2... (found via https://www.pwg.org/blog/january-2015-3d-printing.html)

rasz_pl• 11 years ago

No, it makes no sense. Right now 3D printers eat files, so printing to file is tautology. 3D printers also tent to be very unreliable, you need ability to pause the print (jams, skips). How is putting CUPS between you and the printer helpful?

bitL• 11 years ago

Offtopic: What is currently the best home 3D printer? I am looking for something that produces reasonable level of detail and items that aren't easily destroyed by applying slight rotational forces.

ZenoArrow2• 11 years ago

What's your budget? 3D printers for home use vary in price from a few hundred dollars to many thousands of dollars. Also, they vary quite a bit in terms of the materials they support printing.

If you want one example of a good high end 3D printer for the home market, I'd say take a look at the Form 1+:

http://formlabs.com/products/form-1-plus/

dekhn5• 11 years ago

When I visited Autodesk, they had a ton of broken Form1+'s on the shelf. They said they always broke.

jglauche• 11 years ago

If you aren't too tight on budget, I'd recommend the Lulzbot TAZ Mini at the moment. It's sturdy and reliable. It's fully open hardware too.

dekhn5• 11 years ago

We got a Wan Hao http://3dprint.com/62585/wanhao-usa-duplicator-i3/ for about $400 and it's the best printer we have seen in that price range (part of my job is evaluating 3D printers). I've done a number of detailed, production-quality prints (I make parts for scientific equipment using it).

The Taz and Taz mini are also quite good.

dekhn5• 11 years ago

I stopped printing on Linux when it switched from the old printcap based tools (which while hard to configure, mostly worked) to CUPS. I was an experienced sysadmin, but no amount of configuration could make CUPS print anything but the text of postscript files to my laser printer.

I'm sure it's gotten much better, but CUPS is pretty opaque, and when you're doing 3D printing, controlling the conversion pipeline from model to print code is typically done manually with a great attention to detail.

tjradcliffe• 11 years ago

My first thought on reading the headline was: hadn't they better get printing working first? I just assumed it still doesn't because after five years or so of not being able to print anything but postscript files to a postscript printer I completely gave up on printing on linux, because like you, no amount of messing with configuration stuff would make it work (I could on rare occasions get CUPS configured on a single machine with one printer, but it was always an incredibly fragile and delicate arrangement that fell to bits when anyone looked at it sideways.)

mmastrac• 11 years ago

That's not the fault of CUPS.

Old Laser printers were brutally poor at modeswitching. You have to send the set of escapes for language selection in exactly the right state in the state machine for it to take effect. If you've left a bit of an old job in a buffer somewhere -- oops, that's 50 pages of raw postscript.

Modern printers that ditched plain-ASCII printing are far more reliable.

dekhn5• 11 years ago

I disagree about the old laser printers. I had printcap files that would take dvi2ps postscript just fine. This was CUPS just catting ps output of ghostscript at the printer without setting control codes no matter how it was configured.

kitsunesoba• 11 years ago

I'm kind of surprised to hear that CUPS gives some people so much trouble. I've been using OS X and Linux since around 2001 and neither have given me any mentionable trouble with printing. It's always been install drivers -> flawless printing. In the case of my newest printer, I didn't even need to install drivers since it's AirPrint compliant. CUPS has been great for me.

TD-Linux2• 11 years ago

This mirrors my experience. When I was in college I was always able to plug some random person's printer in via USB and it "just worked". I'm also able to autodiscover and print to all of the laser printers at work. (this is on Linux)

TD-Linux2• 11 years ago

So now you only print from Windows? Certainly not OS X as it also uses CUPS...

makomk2• 11 years ago

I believe the OS X implementation of CUPS is rather different from the standard open-source version used on Linux. In particular, if I recall correctly it uses PDF as its internal working format rather than Postscript and a completely different set of printer drivers to the Linux version.

ams6110• 11 years ago

I started printing on Linux when it switched from the old printcap based tools (which were hard to configure and mostly didn't work) to CUPS. I was an experienced sysadmin, but no amount of configuration could make the old printcap based tools print anything but the text of postscript files to my laser printer.

decktech• 11 years ago

Maybe someone can explain how this works to me: In the white paper (http://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/BOFs/3d-printing/wd-apple-ipp3d-2...) section 5, it lists a bunch of attributes ("material-type", "filament-retraction-speed", etc.) These are all attributes that would be inputs to a slicer. Furthermore, there are a million such parameters (CUPS will never cover them all), are different between different slicers, are ever-changing, and sometimes undocumented.

Why would cups concern itself with these parameters, versus, for example, just acting as a transport for the actual print file (gcode, x3g, etc.)? I feel like this is akin to having CUPS assemble a PDF, versus just acting as a transport for postscript file that gets printed.

marcosdumay• 11 years ago

Well, CUPS does assembly PDFs nowadays.

cmurf• 11 years ago

OS X's been using CUPS for a long time and, as other OS X users have noted, doesn't have the reliability problems people are reporting here on Linux. So those problems must have to do with things that aren't directly CUPS related, like possibly an application, PPD, Ghostscript, backend, or network or USB problem. Each distro packages this up a bit differently and with different versions so that could also be part of the inconsistency.

fake-name• 11 years ago

Can we first stop making fucking ANY x support depend on the entire CUPS subsystem?

I have a LOT of different computers/VMs that need X in some form, and will never, ever EVER print anything. Why do I need the 10+ CUPS packages to install a minimal desktop environment?

This is also true for audio bullcrap.

CUPS 2.1 Is Adding Basic 3D Printer Support

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