Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
What if you put CUPS... in the printer? And made it a network device?<p>Unix printing was designed in an era when most printers were dumb serial or parallel devices chained directly to a computer. Or if they had an ethernet jack, had some bizarro proprietary system that was very minimal and included no memory, queueing, or ability to interpret complex formats like PDF. That is the environment CUPS was designed for. And it was a huge improvement over the old lp system. The "l" in "lp" literally means "line".<p>Like everything else in the computer world printers have gotten a lot more capable. They may literally be running CUPS. That's why you don't need another complex print spooler and format convertor on your client machine.