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CUPS is a standards-based, open-source printing system used by Apple's Mac OS® and other UNIX®-like operating systems, especially also Linux. CUPS uses the Internet Printing Protocol ("IPP") and provides System V and Berkeley command-line interfaces, a web interface, and a C API to manage printers and print jobs.
CUPS 1.0 was released in early 2000 and since then and until CUPS 2.x (at least) conversion of the data format of incoming print jobs to the format the printer needs was done by external filter executables, each taking an input format on stdin and producing an output format on stdout. Depending on conversion needs one or more of them were run in a chain.
The filters for common formats were part of CUPS and later on, when Apple was maintaining CUPS and using their own, proprietary filters for Mac OS, transferred to OpenPrinting as the cups-filters package.
In the New Architecture for printing we switch to an all-IPP workflow with PPD files and printer driver executables being abolished and classic CUPS printer drivers replaced by Printer Applications (software emulation of driverless IPP printers).
To conserve the functionality of the CUPS filters which got developed over the last 20+ years into a PPD-less, IPP-driven world without having to maintain and include the legacy PPD support in OS distributions and other system environments, the original cups-filters package got split into 5 separate packages: libcupsfilters, libppd, cups-filters, braille-printer-app, and cups-browsed, with libcupsfilters and braille-printer-app not containing PPD file support code any more and cups-browsed being planned to drop explicit use of PPD files.
This package provides the libcupsfilters library, which in its 2.x version contains all the code of the filters of the former cups-filters package as library functions, the so-called filter functions.
The call scheme of the filter functions is similar to the one of the
CUPS filter executables (see cupsfilters/filter.h), but
generalized. In addition, it accepts printer and job IPP attributes
but not PPD files any more. The PPD file interfacing for retro-fitting
got moved to libppd.
The filter functions are principally intended to be used for the data format conversion tasks needed in Printer Applications. They are already in use (together with libppd and pappl-retrofit) by the CUPS-driver retro-fitting Printer Applications from OpenPrinting.
In addition to the filter functions libcupsfilters also contains several API functions useful for developing printer drivers/Printer Applications, like image and raster graphics handling, make/model/device ID matching, ...
For compiling and using this package see the INSTALL file.
Report bugs to
https://github.com/OpenPrinting/libcupsfilters/issuesSee the "COPYING", "LICENCE", and "NOTICE" files for legal information. The license is the same as for CUPS, for a maximum of compatibility.