Printer/Scanner Management

Printer/Scanner Management

Silicon Graphics provides a printing and scanning environment for IRIS workstations. This environment, Impressario, has features for a wide range of IRIX audiences: printer and scanner driver developers, application program developers, and end users. Impressario allows files of different types to be printed on a wide variety of printers and allows images to be scanned from a scanning device, an IRIS screen, or a Silicon Graphics image file.

Impressario provides the following libraries for application developers:

libspool: Provides an API to the IRIX printer spooling system and functions, allowing you to submit print jobs, query their status, and so on.
libprintui: Provides a graphical interface for printing that's compatible with IRIS IM.
libpod: Provides a network-transparent interface to the Printer Object Database (POD). Each printer has a POD that contains configuration, status, and other information about that printer.
libscan: Provides an interface to the Impressario scanning system.
libstiff: Allows you to read and write Stream TIFF (STIFF) files.
libimp: Allows you to read and write Silicon Graphics image files in RGB format.

Impressario is built on top of the System V print spooling system. It provides model files, filters, and drivers to convert ISO text files, SGI images files, PostScript® documents, and a wide variety of other file formats to a format suitable for both raster and PostsScript printers. Figure 6-12 shows the relationship between an application program, the Impressario libraries, and the spooling system in IRIX.

Figure 6-12 : Interface to the Spooling System Refer to the Impressario Programming Guide for information about writing a driver for a printer or scanner device for which no driver is available.