Chapter 5. Determining whether a printer supports driverless printing

CUPS supports driverless printing, which means that you can print without providing any hardware-specific software for the printer model. For this, the printer must inform the client about its capabilities and use one of the following standards:

  • AirPrint™
  • IPP Everywhere™
  • Mopria®
  • Wi-Fi Direct Print Services

You can use the ipptool utility to find out whether a printer supports driverless printing.

Prerequisites

  • The printer or remote print server supports the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP).
  • The host can connect to the IPP port of the printer or remote print server. The default IPP port is 631.

Procedure

  • Query the ipp-versions-supported and document-format-supported attributes, and ensure that get-printer-attributes test passes:

    • For a remote printer, enter: 

      # ipptool -tv ipp://<ip_address_or_hostname>:631/ipp/print get-printer-attributes.test | grep -E "ipp-versions-supported|document-format-supported|get-printer-attributes"
Get printer attributes using get-printer-attributes      [PASS]
    ipp-versions-supported (1setOf keyword) = ...
    document-format-supported (1setOf mimeMediaType) = ...

    • For a queue on a remote print server, enter: 

      # ipptool -tv ipp://<ip_address_or_hostname>:631/printers/<queue_name> get-printer-attributes.test | grep -E "ipp-versions-supported|document-format-supported|get-printer-attributes"
Get printer attributes using get-printer-attributes      [PASS]
    ipp-versions-supported (1setOf keyword) = ...
    document-format-supported (1setOf mimeMediaType) = ...

    To ensure that driverless printing works, verify in the output:

    • The get-printer-attributes test returns PASS.
    • The IPP version that the printer supports is 2.0 or higher.

    • The list of formats contains one of the following:

      • application/pdf
      • image/urf
      • image/pwg-raster
    • For color printers, the output contains one of the mentioned formats and, additionally, image/jpeg.

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