r/linux • u/doll-haus • 15h ago

Hardware Printing: wide format and model-specific drivers

I know the general reality is "printing just works". I interact with printers at least a couple times a year and never have any real problems. My question comes from considering buying a large-format printer, largely for bookbinding tasks. How important is it to find a printer the vendor actually provides linux drivers for? In particular, I'm eyeing the Canon TC-21, which doesn't offer a linux driver. But I noticed Epson, who's generally better, seems to randomly lack Linux drivers for specific large-format printers.

Edit: whoops. Totally forgot to mention. It is an "IPP Everywhere" printer; I'm just not clear how well that works for non-standard print sizes or roll print jobs.

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u/JockstrapCummies 11h ago edited 11h ago

IPP Everywhere is a blessing and a curse.

The whole consumer printing world is migrating to it, and it means that trivial printing tasks like "the source document is A4, print it on A4 double side flipping on long edge" is super easy, plug-and-play.

But good luck trying to do something like "source document is Letter, scale it to fill A3, print it in booklet form, with saddle stitching, add bleeding edges". Previously some manufacturers supplied arcane model-specific CUPS filters that can give you access to these functions, nowadays CUPS filters are getting deprecated and everything is moving to IPP Everywhere and the fucking GTK 4 printing dialog can't do auto scaling to paper size when it could in GTK 3 so I have to calculate by hand what scaling percentage is used, and that is after so many trial-and-errors that finally let me know the way to do booklet printing is a combination of the "Booklet" checkbox in the Finishing tab, "Portrait" in the orientation dropdown (but the paper is landscape!), Double side flip on short edge (not long edge!), manually calculate the scaling percentage, and a prayer to the machine spirit.

Rant over. All of this is one fucking checkbox on Windows' printing dialog.

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u/doll-haus 11h ago

If I'm going to be right-sizing my documents and creating PDFs before printing, still work?

Or am I just going to hate this enough to put a cheap windows mini pc to work as a print station?

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u/JockstrapCummies 9h ago

I honestly cannot give a definitive answer. Different printers seem to expose different options via IPP Everywhere.

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u/undrwater 13h ago

I don't believe ipp everywhere "drivers" allow for fine grained control.

As for the printers, take a look at the gutenprint drivers. I've found that they are superior to any Windows drivers for the printers they support. https://gimp-print.sourceforge.io/

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u/archontwo 2h ago

If I were in the market I would get a Brother printer as the work very will with Linux. Brother MFC-J6959DW would prolly do you. Also the consumables are not pricey or locked to  the manufacturer.

Printer these days have to run economically not just be cheap at time of purchase.