AirPrint support

[gabi18m]

Hello, would it be possible to add AirPrint support, meaning when device is in Server Mode to be discoverable by iOS devices and allow printing from them?

[deakjahn]

I suppose it would be possible – I wonder what it needs more than the already existing CUPS protocol in the server. I started to look it up, so it might be coming, who knows. :-)

[deakjahn]

Just advertising to AirPrint is easy, so you might expect it in the next version. However, this only means that it will work out-of-the-box if the particular printer you use understands one of PDF, PWG or URF.

The next step would be to accept one or all of these formats, anyway, and convert and send it to the printer even if it doesn't understand the format directly. This also seems possible, but it's a much more complex process than the above.

[gabi18m]

With my Canon MP540, I got CUPS working, also with airprint support, on a raspberry pi as server, but with your app I could not print anything actually. It finds the printer, I put it on GDI, but when printing the test page or printing anything from the phone nothing happens. Connected with USB OTG

Unrelated to my AirPrint request of course

[deakjahn]

I went into it deeper.

AirPrint won't work, IPP Everywhere will (which is practically the same but Apple, as always, had to have its own name and hype about it, as if they invented anything :-) ). The problem is that all three are nothing else but IPP and IPP has the default port of 631. Android, without rooting, reserves ports below 1024 for system use. IPP Everywhere works happily with non-default ports like 1631, AirPrint does not.

So, my plan is to add them as new protocols to the existing list of protocols, so in addition to plain IPP, you could also select them directly. But that won't help with the limitation above, so it can't work via AirPrint unless you have a rooted phone.