After recently adding support for scanning through a virtual filesystem interface in libferris I thought I'd complete the cycle and add printer-as-filesystem too. This of course allows the neat trick to "copy" a document from your scanner and dumping it to a printer:
$ ferriscp scanner:///my-scanner/color/scan.png printer:///my-friends-printer/
Naturally the printer and scanner don't have to be in the same room etc. As you can see from the above, writing a picture to a file inside the printer's virtual directory prints that image to paper. By default images are smooth stretched to fit the entire page, not a huge issue if you scan and print at the same DPI.
Images can come from anywhere, to hard copy a webcam
$ ferriscp gstreamer://capture/webcam.jpg printer:///Ich-bin-ein-drucker/
If on the other hand you write a plain text file to the printer's directory it will be printed in an acceptable manner too. So something like this works
$ date | ferris-redirect -T printer://Cups-PDF/foo
In this case, you can expect a ~/Desktop/foo.pdf file which is a PDF document with the current date in it. One can think if ferris-redirect as the shell "|" but which natively knows about all the libferris filesystems. On the other hand, you could use FUSE to mount printer:// at some normal kernel location and just do
$ date >| ~/printer/Cups-PDF/foo
Of course, none of this is meant to replace programs which let you tweak how images are printed, format how text will appear, or select from the myriad of options your printer offers you. But if you want a piece of paper from a scanner to a printer, such a "copy" might be just the ticket.
2 comments:
Cool! Would we be able to add a Dolphin place "printer" and drop files from dolphin on that to print them?
Yep, since printers are just somewhere to write files that should work.
Even better if you can
drop to append to an existing copy job.
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