Cups, Saucers

The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) is a modular printing system for Unix-like computer operating systems that allows a computer to act as a print server. more...

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A computer running CUPS is a host that can accept print jobs from client computers, process them, and send them to the appropriate printer.

CUPS consists of a print spooler and scheduler, a filter system that converts the print data to a format that the printer will understand, and a backend system that sends this data to the print device. CUPS uses the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) as the basis for managing print jobs and queues. It also provides the traditional command line interfaces for the System V and Berkeley print systems, along with limited support for the server message block (SMB) protocol. The device drivers CUPS supplies can be configured by using text files in Adobe's PostScript Printer Description (PPD) format. There are a number of user interfaces for different platforms that can configure CUPS, and it has a built-in web-based interface. CUPS is free software, provided under the GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 2.

History

Michael Sweet, who owns Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997. The first public betas appeared in 1999 . The original design of CUPS used the LPD protocol, but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for several Linux distributions, including Red Hat Linux. In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2. In February of 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.

Overview

CUPS provides a mechanism that allows print jobs to be sent to printers in a standard fashion. The data is sent to a scheduler which sends jobs to a filter system that converts the print job into a format the printer will understand. The filter system then passes the data on to a backend—a special filter that sends print data to a device or network connection. The system makes extensive use of PostScript and rasterization of data to convert the data into a format that is suitable for the printer.

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