Thread: Printing from device
View Single Post
TA-t3 is offline TA-t3
2009-10-21 , 14:37
Posts: 3,841 | Thanked: 1,079 times | Joined on Nov 2006
#5
Originally Posted by sjgadsby View Post
That said, if you have a printer that accepts Bluetooth connections, you should be able to send at least photos to it. Some printers may also accept PDF documents that way.
Or PostScript.

There have also been print servers made that accept plain text files via FTP, though they aren't common.
There are apparently some now that even accept files through SFTP.

In the past, the community (specifically Penguinbait and debernardis) have put together printing support packages for Maemo that are based upon desktop Linux printing technologies. However, these add-ons have been huge installs [..]
My lprng port was pretty small though. apt-cache show lprng says 'Installed size: 3284' (kilobytes).

The reason cups gets so big is that it includes all the powerful filters to convert pdf, postscript, pictures etc. to a format printers understand. This is all stuff that is actually not needed on a client (the tablet), it's for the cups server (the actual cups-compatible printer or cups-server computer with printer).

[..]and haven't made it as simple as tapping "Print" in any application.
Indeedy. This is the biggest problem, because it's completely out of the hands of us printer packages providers. The applications themselves need to have an option to format and forward content to the printer daemon (be that cups, lprng or something else).

Still, their work has made printing at least more widely possible, and they (or someone else) may continue their work in the Maemo 5 era.
This will happen. It may even be that some of the old existing packages will still work out of the box, not being GUI-oriented applications.
__________________
N800/OS2007|N900/Maemo5
-- Metalayer-crawler delenda est.
-- Current state: Fed up with everything MeeGo.