Any comments or suggestions to this Specification are welcome!!! ?BR Please openly discuss this on [http://lists.debian.org/debian-printing/ debian-printing mailing list].

PPD File Structure Specification

Created: 05/01/2006 by Pascal De Vuyst ?BR Last update: 03/03/2006 ?BR Contributors: Roger Leigh, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh and Chris Lawrence ?BR Packages affected: cupsys, foomatic-filters-ppds, hplip-ppds, cupsys-driver-gutenprint and hp-ppd. ?BR When writing this specification the ?PrintingFilesystem Specification has been taken into consideration.

Introduction

There are several packages in Debian that provide Postscript Printer Descriptions (["PPD"]s) for PostScript and non-PostScript printers. These packages should cooperate to form a single database of unique PPDs. This allows GUI tools like the CUPS "Add Printer" web interface and gnome-cups-add to provide users a printer model list for adding printers.

Design

The main idea is to have the following file structure to make it possible for GUI tools to locate PPDs easy and fast: ?BR common directory/ppd_meant_for/manufacturer/filename.ppd

  1. The database of PPDs should be located in a common directory.
  2. To avoid possible filename clashes between different PPD providing packages there should be a further classification refering to the upstream project where the PPDs are meant for/were created for.
  3. To seperate PPDs from different manufacturers a further classification by make/manufacturer of the printer under "ppd_meant_for" is necessary.
  4. The database is formed by several packages which provide PPD files inside this structure and it is not necessary to install all off these packages.
  5. Two different packages should not provide the same PPDs to avoid duplicate printer model entries in GUI tools.

Implementation

  1. PPDs should be located in /usr/share according to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard because they contain static and arch-independent information.
  2. As common directory /usr/share/ppd should be used (this directory is currently used for this purpose).

  3. This ppd directory should contain subdirectories that refer to the name of the "upstream project" where the PPDs were created for:
    • /usr/share/ppd/cups-included for PPDs that come with cups;

    • /usr/share/ppd/espgs for non-PostScript PPDs from linuxprinting.org's foomatic-db project that can be used with binary printer drivers included in ESP Ghostscript;

    • /usr/share/ppd/hpijs for PPDs from HPLIP project;

    • /usr/share/ppd/gutenprint for PPDs from gutenprint project;

    • /usr/share/ppd/postscript for real PPDs for PostScript printers from linuxprinting.org's foomatic-db project.

    • ...
  4. The above mentioned directory should contain subdirectories according to the *Manufacturer string as specified in the [http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/5003.PPD_Spec_v4.3.pdf PPD specification v4.3]. The *Manufacturer strings are case sensitive and must be noted literally as in the PPD specification. ?BR e.g. /usr/share/ppd/gs/HP, /usr/share/ppd/postscript/Epson, /usr/share/ppd/gs/Lexmark, ...

  5. All PPDs should be gzipped to reduce disk space usage.
  6. Inside the PPDs a *Manufacturer string should be used as specified in the Adobe PPD specification v4.3.
  7. Packages that need PPDs are responsible for symlinking to the PPDs in /usr/share/ppd. For example the cupsys package should simply include a symlink from /usr/share/cups/model/ppd to /usr/share/ppd.
  8. Packages that provide PPDs should NOT contain symlinks for other packages that need PPDs. The reason for this is that symlinks from different PPD providing packages can overlap each other resulting in duplicate drivers being seen by GUI tools (which are actually the same).

Current PPD providing packages in Debian

Current issues that need to be addressed