IPP Device Driver

IPP is a protocol used to access printers and printer servers through a TCP/IP network. IPP servers are implemented by,

• various network capable printers
• Windows 2000, 2003 and XP using IIS
• CUPS - the UNIX printer server
• Mac OS X
• and probably others I have yet to come across.

IPP Device Driver is a relocatable module that lets you print directly to any of these servers from RISC OS. You must have a RISC OS printer driver for your printer as well as this device driver. Subtle difference.

Fortunately, CUPS will happily accept PostScript from RISC OS printer drivers and convert into something most modern printers, including photo quality inkjets, can accept. CUPS can use GIMP Print drivers to give extremely good results.

You can also use Martin Würthner's RISC OS port of GIMP Print to print to these inkjets directly from RISC OS, but this requires significantly more memory and CPU power. The time taken to spool the print job to a CUPS server using my I³ Etherlan network card is not noticably slower than printing to a file.

IPP Device Driver contains the only example I can find of an HTTP client that sends chunked POST data without attempting to crash the server. Development versions performed high effective denial of service attacks on my CUPS server.

If you're using the module with servers other than CUPS, please let me know how you get on, I only have CUPS to test on.

• IPP Device Driver v1.00a (Not Iyonix compatible)
• IPP Device Driver v1.04 (Not Iyonix compatible)

If you'd like to make IPP Device Driver Iyonix compatible, please get it touch. It may well work with Aemulor or Aemulor Pro. Please let me know of success or failure, I have nothing to test it on!

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