I got the 3rd generation iPad and needed to print some emails ? actually to save them as pdf. Easy enough to do on a Mac in Safari, but not an option in iOS 5.1. So, to get AirPrint working with cups-pdf on Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS.
Avahi
Prior to this, I used airprint-generate.py to get AirPrint working with a regular printer. I manually duplicated the avahi service file for the cups-pdf printer from the regular printer created with the script. I imagine I could have used it again to create a avahi service file for cups-pdf.
/etc/avahi/services/AirPrint-PDF.service <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd"> <service-group> <name replace-wildcards="yes">AirPrint PDF @ server.local</name> <service> <type>_ipp._tcp</type> <subtype>_universal._sub._ipp._tcp</subtype> <port>631</port> <txt-record>txtvers=1</txt-record> <txt-record>qtotal=1</txt-record> <txt-record>Transparent=T</txt-record> <txt-record>URF=none</txt-record> <txt-record>rp=printers/PDF</txt-record> <txt-record>note=AirPrint</txt-record> <txt-record>product=(GPL Ghostscript)</txt-record> <txt-record>printer-state=3</txt-record> <txt-record>printer-type=0x80901c</txt-record> <txt-record>pdl=application/octet-stream,application/pdf,application/postscript,image/gif,image/jpeg,image/png,image/tiff,text/html,text/plain,application/openofficeps,application/vnd.cups-banner,application/vnd.cups-pdf,application/vnd.cups-postscript</txt-record> </service> </service-group>
Of course, the key entry here, is the cups path to to printer:
<txt-record>rp=printers/PDF</txt-record>
I suppose it could be a path to a different cups server.
Cups-pdf
If not installed, install it on Ubuntu with:
apt-get install cups-pdf
Then, in cd /var/spool/cups-pdf/ we will have to make a link to your home directory. In this tutorial, I am using Dropbox to sync the generated pdfs. So, I created a link to a folder in my Dropbox folder for anonymous pdf files.
ls -la total 16 drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2012-03-17 00:48 . drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 2012-03-17 00:15 .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 2012-03-17 00:38 ANONYMOUS -> /home/<user>/Dropbox/Docs/PDF drwxrwxrwt 2 root lpadmin 4096 2012-03-17 00:46 ANONYMOUS-orig drwxr-x--x 2 root lpadmin 4096 2012-03-17 10:32 SPOOL
Also, we need to change some settings in /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf. Since this server is only for me, I don’t really have to worry about others, so I change the user output destination.
Out ${HOME}/Dropbox/Docs/PDF
I was also forced to change the AnonUser to my own account. Obviously, I would have liked to not have done this, but I had to, to get it to work.
AnonUser <youraccount>
Apparmor
I also had to change apparmor a bit as it wasn’t allowing cups to write files in my user directory.
/etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd
Find the lines with “{HOME}” and “PDF” in them and change to match the desired destination:
@{HOME}/Dropbox/Docs/PDF/ rw,
@{HOME}/Dropbox/Docs/PDF/* rw,
Once that is done, restart apparmor, cups, and avahi. Log files for cups-pdf are at /var/log/cups/cups-pdf_log.
If you get a error like
[ERROR] failed to set file mode for PDF file (non fatal) (<path>/Test_Page.pdf)
Either you have filesystems permissions or app armor is causing problems.
UPDATE: See http://sysblog.sund.org/2012/10/ios-6-and-airprint-on-ubuntu/