I am looking at buying a printer (actually an all-in-one I prefer for the features it provides, but I want to focus on the printer part here) which does not provide linux drivers, but does provide Mac OS X drivers. I know that both operating systems (can) use CUPS for printing. Does this mean that I could copy the ppd (driver) file from the Mac OS X driver package and use it (modified) under linux?When looking into the file, there are Mac OS X print dialog-specific lines such as*APPrinterIconPath: /Library/Printers/<path to icons file>.icns*APDialogExtension: /Library/Printers/<path to Mac OS X plugin file>.plugin*APAutoSetupTool: /Library/Printers/<path to autoconfig utility>that I think I can safely remove. There are also lines with OS X-specific paths such as*cupsFilter:        application/vnd.cups-raster 0 /Library/Printers/<path to filter file>*OKDitherLibrary: /Library/Printers/<path to dither library>.dylibthat I don't know what to do with. As with the last line, there are quite a number of other lines with keywords starting with 'OK', which I think are vendor-specific, such as*OKPaperCheckManualFeed_CheckOFF: True*OKSupportCUPaperSizeCheck: True*OKSupportCustomManualFeed_CheckOFF: True*OKSupportPCLMediaTypeUSERTYPE: Yes*OKSupportMarginCentering: Truewhich I also don't know what to do with.(As a fallback, given that the printer supports PCL6, I could use the generic driver for that, but then miss out on miss out on possibly interesting functionality.)
Can (CUPS) ppd files for Mac OS X be used for linux?
linux;osx;drivers;printing;cups
PPD files are platform-independent. However, they may reference external executables, and those are platform-dependent. In particular, cupsFilter specifies a program that converts the input from a format that CUPS understands (here, application/vnd.cups-raster, i.e. a bitmap format) into a format that the printer understands. You'll need to find a Linux version of the filter program to use this PPD file under Linux.To see the state of Linux support for a printer, look it up in the OpenPrinting database.Since the printer accepts PCL6, you may well be able to use that PPD file and just replace the filter by a generic raster-to-PCL filter.