Description of problem: Various plotters/knife cutters/laser cutters such as the Graphtec need HPGL or filtered HPGL as input. Although all of the pipeline for this is free software and exists our print system has no idea how to drive them Expected Results: Recognize the printer and/or offer generic/hpgl option Produce a print pipeline of: pstoedit -f plot-hpgl Or for cutters that need filtering pstoedit -f plot-hgpl | hpgl-distiller For anyone doing signmaking, laser cutting or similar this means you can then print from inkscape and produce product without hacks See also: http://pldaniels.com/hpgl-distiller Can provide a test environment.
Sounds like you need to make a package that provides: a) CUPS filter (man 7 filter) for converting application/postscript to application/hpgl (or whatever). Just need to parse arguments and work out whether input comes from stdin or from a named file b) PPD file(s) with the appropriate *cupsFilter line -- you can probably use cupsddk to create one to suit. Just need something like: *cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 my-pstohpgl-filter" None of this needs changes to system-config-printer or to cups.
Let me know if you need further help with it.
I opened this bug against system-config-printer not cups. Re-opening. This ought to be automatic, and/or an system-config-printer option for generic/hpgl
It's nothing to do with system-config-printer -- nowadays that is just another interface to CUPS, just like http://localhost:631/ and like /usr/sbin/lpadmin. All you need to do is make yourself a cupshpgl package which just provides the PPD and the filter. (...and then we can put it through the Fedora review process etc) See e.g. gutenprint-cups, which does something extremely similar. No changes are needed in existing packages for this.