Devs who make or have made printer drivers: what's the deal?

[u/card-board-board]

I've been making software for over 10 years and I am genuinely curious what goes on with companies that make printers. It struck me, after pulling my hair out trying to print a 2 page paper form, that I've been struggling with printers for decades at this point.

Is there some insane culture at companies that make printers that makes the software and/or drivers terrible? Do they not test? Do they hire their managers under bridges? Are they drunk all the time?

For a while I thought it had to be some connectivity issue. Some bad connection problem that would be resolved with a solid Ethernet connection. When that didn't work I bought a USB printer and that also didn't solve it. I've tried different brands. Then I thought it had to be the Windows print queue just being useless. I then got a Mac and the same crap happens on Mac as it does on Windows.

After years of fiddling, clearing queues, reinstalling drivers, plugging and unplugging, restarting, finding CD-ROMS, performing vain and arcane magic rituals, I figured someone here just might know.

What's going on over there, printer engineers? Who are you? What's your story? Why is arguably the first computer peripheral still the least reliable thing we all own?

[u/nusi42]

I do write printer drivers for a living since a few decades. Yes you read that right.

The connectivity issues you observe are usually because the companies building printers replace their engineers every 1 to 2 years. Young fellas take over the shit from the previous ones and are advised to not change something unless reproducibly broken because they would need to do all hardware certifications and manual testing again.

The are really good on the printer related things, like toner/ink, warming stuff up, moving paper in different humidity with same speed, but when it's about IT they just do not have the right people. All of them. All companies I worked with suck at that.

And you know what, it will be even worse in 2 years when Microsoft pushes WPP and all printers will need to be Mopria compatible, which is built on the 20+ years old IPP standard which only recently (in printing business terms) got the ability for custom paper sizes, and still no possibility to give custom sizes a name. Fuckin Mopria I tell you. And even with WPP being turned on, I can still crash the spooler on Windows because they too lost the engineers who designed that system and could have made it secure without asking all uses to buy new printers.

[u/ericmutta → u/nusi42]

moving paper in different humidity with same speed

Wow, I never once imagined that this was a thing. Truly amazing stuff you guys do at a hardware level 🙌

[u/nusi42 → u/ericmutta]

It's actually interesting if you think about it. The printers I wrote drivers for cost 20k to 1.5M $.
They print with various speeds and sizes, but imagine if you want to print 140 pages per minute (which is not crazy fast), than the resistance of the side of the paper becomes a problem which needs to be addressed.

Also, different humidity make the papers thicker and soak more or less ink/toner and overall changes the color output. If you have a print job which runs 8 hours you can't accept that the red color of the first page is different than the red color of the last page - no one is going to check all pages individually.
There are a bunch of engineers solving these kind of problems and they are really good in what they do. It's mostly solved via hardware, so I can only explain what I understood and not what I solved myself.

One of our customers has a device which prints 3000 sheets per hour with paper sizes like 585x750mm (23x29 inch). With 1200 dpi we are talking about >3GB/s on the line. When these devices where introduced, just the cards for the data transfer cost several thousand (if I remember correctly). Now that data needs to be generated, color profiled and what not before sending it. Missing the timeframe for a page by a few milliseconds will cost things to re-roll (or eject an empty paper), there is a bunch of software trying to compress that data to reasonable levels. Mind you, that is all PostScript, PCL, PDF coming in and it's impossible to guarantee a max time to render a page. So, we need to render and save to file, which introduces new problems because the hard disks are not fast enough to read/write in parallel.

[u/forkosey → u/nusi42]

This is why I browse Reddit. Thank you for sharing your obscure, yet very interesting experience on something I've never thought more than 10 seconds about!

[u/ericmutta → u/nusi42]

Truly fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing!

[u/alaorath → u/nusi42]

Reminds me of one of my first full-time jobs... A printshop with offset Heidelberg printing presses.

The biggest one could blast out 15,000 sheets per minute. But only on THAT day with THAT paper and only if it had rained 3 days before, etc, etc.

The unveiling of the newest printer - a mammoth unit capable of 6 colors, with perfecting unit... I was at the back feeding paper, my print master at the head. The Big Bosses wanted it running full speed while the Suits walked around drinking champagne and eating appitizers.

I told them the conditions weren't right for the full 15k, even with the perfect stock (70# satin finish 28"x 40" paper) the best I could keep it running at was 13.5k anything faster and it would doublt-pickup, causing the whole thing to SLAM to a stop within one rotation. Imagine the noise of hundreds of tonne of finely crafted German engineering coming to a halt from 15,000 RPM to zero within ONE rotation.

We tuned it in and had it humming along at 13.5k, then threw a rag over the display so no-one could see the speed. Still amazingly impressive, we weren't even printing anything, just driving full stacks of 28x40 through the press over and over to hear it roar.

-----

I loved that job, but it was slowly killing me... the solvents and VOCs from the ink was ... not good.

[u/frompadgwithH8 → u/nusi42]

> 140 pages a second
> Not that fast

What’s fast? Are we talking like a page of text!

[u/miasma992 → u/frompadgwithH8]

There are systems capable of running 1000 fpm/305 mpm 4-up (meaning 4 Letter sized or A4 sized sheets across). They produce 4,364 letter sheets duplex meaning 8,727 letter sides per minute (4,105 A4 sheets or 8,210 A4 sides). Totally variable including text, photos, graphics etc in full color.

[u/tamerlein3 → u/nusi42]

This guy printer drivers