Netatalk documentation enhancements

[michaelrsweet]

Version: 1.1.19rc2
CUPS.org User: thomas.kaiser.phg-online

First, Netatalk should be written as "Netatalk" and not "NeTAtalk" as in the SAM.

Umich wrote it that way and the sourceforge folks do so, too (http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/netatalk.html and http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/)

Currently patches for netatalk's papd are on the way that help automagically publish all CUPS spoolers via PAP (Printer Access Protocol) to Macintosh clients. A prerelease (http://netatalk.agentur-fineline.de/) is available. I can inform you when it's final, if you want.

In the meantime there are some backends available to print to AppleTalk printers via Netatalk. I started writing my own, too that has some unique (but IMO absolutely necessary) features:

• full device discovery (including sending printer queries
  to get the "product" name of the printers)
• support for multiple zones
• encoding of device names (don't know whether that's
  absolutely necessary but I thought it would be a good
  idea as only three chars in MacRoman are illegal in
  AppleTalk device names)
• additional form feeds for devices of type "DeskWriter"
• Notifications for the scheduler

If you find this useful, I can try to strip the functionality down to Netatalk only (currently the backend also supports MacOS X/Darwin) and add the pagecount query stuff to exactly report the printed pages.

http://users.phg-online.de/tk/CUPS/backend/pap

[michaelrsweet]

CUPS.org User: mike

Thanks, this is also updated in the documentation.

As for the CUPS-aware version of Netatalk and the backends, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested! While I'm not sure we'd want to put the code in as part of the core CUPS release (since Netatalk doesn't run on all platforms), please feel free to publish those solutions on the CUPS links page so everyone can find them and you can post news when new versions are available.

Also, starting with CUPS 1.1.19 you'll be able to use the new "PAGE: total NNN" comment to report the actual, total number of pages that were printed. See the IPP backend (backend/ipp.c) for an example.

As always, thanks!