captdriver

📣 IMPORTANT NOTE to Fellow Hackers who Have Forked This Repo 📣

A rebase has been scheduled for this repository, in order to stay in sync with the Alexey's orignal repo The rebase will take place on or after 24th June, 2022 UTC.

The following changes will take place:

• The history of the master branch as of today will be preserved in 0.1.4-original-history
• 0.1.4.1-RE will become the starting point for future pull request branches
  • Please make pull requests to this branch while we are at version 0.1.4.
• 0.1.4.1-master will be absorbed back into master. Some commits may be squashed.

Please aware of the extra .1 on the names of the new branches. Thanks a million!

Foreword

Captdriver is a free (as in speech) alternative driver for Canon printers that can only accept the proprietary CAPT data stream format. It aims to be a reliable and truly portable alternative driver. It's free and open source, so you can take part in its development, and help with expanding support, adding new features, and most importantly, maintaining its codebase.

As Captdriver is almost completely written in C, and uses the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), it is potentially compatible with any operating system with a working copy of CUPS, regardless of hardware architecture.

As a bonus for users on x86-64 hardware, Captdriver eliminates the need to install 32-bit libraries on your 64-bit operating system.

Status

Captdriver is currently admittedly far from complete. The driver is under active development, but updates are sporadic. For details, look in these places:

• Releases
• Issues
• Issues on the original repository
• Wiki

Four printer families have been successfully used with this driver:

• LBP2900/LBP2900B
• LBP3000
• LBP3010/LBP3018/LBP3050
• LBP3100/LBP3108/LBP3150

Acknowledgements

This driver is based on the works of Rildo Pragana, Nicolas Boichat, Alexey Galakhov, Benoit Bolsee and Vitaliy Tomin. Special thanks to the other contributors who made this driver possible, and the folks who donated their spare time to test and review my edits!

Installation and Setup

This software must be manually installed. Please refer to Mounaiban's Captdriver Wiki for detailed instructions.

Technical Information

Details of the CAPT format are documented in the SPECS file. While incomplete and expected to contain errors and omissions, help with expanding it and making corrections is greatly appreciated. Please also check the wiki for detailed information not yet added to this file.

Disclaimers

Please use this driver at your own risk. As with any software licensed under the GNU General Public License 3.0, there is NO WARRANTY. Full terms and conditions are detailed in the file named COPYING.

This is unofficial software not endorsed by Canon Inc. or any of its affiliates.

macOS is a registered trademark of Apple Inc, registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions.

Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.