README

airprint-generate.py

This script will generate avahi .service files for shared CUPS printers.

This script will connect to a CUPS server and for each printer configured and
marked as shared will generate a .service file for avahi that is compatible
with Apple's AirPrint announcements. Any printer that can be configured to work
with CUPS can be used. Printers should not be configured in CUPS as raw, unless
the printer can natively print PDF. That is to say, CUPS needs to already be
configured with a PDF filter. Debian based distributions ship CUPS pre-configured
this way.

This script can also discover networked printers via DNS-SD, independent of CUPS,
and produce exact .service files for them, allowing the printers to be announced
on different subnets by copying the .service files to /etc/avahi/services/ there.
This solves the problem of AirPrint printers not being availabe outside the
local subnet even though routing/NAT exists between subnets.

DNSSD has a limit of 255 Chars for a given txt-record, because of this the list
of accepted pdl's will be truncated to fit. If you're curious to see which ones
are trimmed out of the list run with the script with the verbose flag (--verbose)

If python-lxml is installed, .service files will be generated in a human
readble format, I wasn't able to get minidom's version to work acceptably.

The git repository also contains airprint.convs, airprint.types and apple.types.  These need 
to be copied to the /usr/share/cups/mime folder.

Copy the .service files generated by this script to /etc/avahi/services.

Then restart both avahi and cups with 
sudo service avahi-daemon restart
sudo service cups restart

**Python Requirements:**
This script requires depends on the python-cups library, and optionally python-lxml to make pretty xml files. 

Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install python-cups python-lxml 

CentOS:
sudo yum install system-config-printer-libs


Usage: airprint-generate.py [options]

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s, --dnssd           Search for network printers using DNS-SD (requires
                        avahi)
  -D DNSDOMAIN, --dnsdomain=DNSDOMAIN
                        DNS domain where printers are located.
  -c, --cups            Search CUPS for shared printers (requires CUPS)
  -H HOSTNAME, --host=HOSTNAME
                        Hostname of CUPS server (optional)
  -P PORT, --port=PORT  Port number of CUPS server
  -u USER, --user=USER  Username to authenticate with against CUPS
  -d DIRECTORY, --directory=DIRECTORY
                        Directory to create service files
  -v, --verbose         Print debugging information to STDERR
  -p PREFIX, --prefix=PREFIX
                        Prefix all files with this string
  -a, --admin           Include the printer specified uri as the adminurl