Support for Brother label printers

[cdplayer]

I'd like support for PT-P700 and QL700 models. Is there ability to help financially for these units.
https://atyourside.brother.co.uk/developer-centre/labelling-solutions

[michaelrsweet]

I don't have anything set up for this at the moment, but I'll see what options there are.

(But honestly I'm not looking to turn LPrint into a commercial product - this is just a side project for me...)

[cdplayer]

Just looking to help out our local hackerspace. The Brother models are considerably more popular in Australia but lack good support for linux. Thanks for your work on cups, and starting lprint.

[andreas-gruenbacher]

There's actually pretty decent documentation for those printers in the form of the Raster Command Reference manuals at https://www.brother.co.jp/eng/dev/command/reference/.

The upstream location for the current foomatic based driver is at https://github.com/philpem/printer-driver-ptouch, and I've recently started updating that driver when in need for decent support for PT-P700 printers: https://github.com/trialinfo/ptouch-driver. I wasn't aware of LPrint when I started working on this, so that's unfortunate timing.

[michaelrsweet]

@andreas-gruenbacher Thanks for the reference documentation, that'll be exactly what I'd need to develop a driver. A lot of the newer Brother label printers actually support IPP and AirPrint - those will work out-of-the-box with CUPS, sans drivers... :)

[andreas-gruenbacher]

My PT-P900W seems to implement that, but it's currently worthless to me because I can't integrate the printer into my wireless network: that requires either Wi-Fi Protected Setup or using a Windows utility, and I can use neither.

Also, for the application I need the PT-P700 support for, the most I can expect of users is to know how to plug both the USB and the power cable in and to find the ON button. So if I were to use PT-P900Ws for that application instead, they would surely also be plugged in over USB.

Another aspect is network security: Enabling IPP support in the printer means putting trust in Brother's IPP implementation. And believe it or not, there are actually people who would rather use something like LPrint for that reason alone ;)

[andreas-gruenbacher]

@michaelrsweet If you end up implementing this yourself, have a look at the ptexplain utility for debugging printer command streams in my ptouch-driver repository. It's as much a work in progress as these things always are, but it was extremely helpful to me already.

[michaelrsweet]

@andreas-gruenbacher The AirPrint certification process puts the IPP stack through some fairly rigorous testing, so I personally wouldn't worry about the quality of the IPP implementation. And we can even do IPP over USB these days...

[andreas-gruenbacher]

Just as a data point, PT-P900W advertise with bInterfaceProtocol 2, so no IPP over USB.

[michaelrsweet]

@cdplayer @andreas-gruenbacher FWIW, I'm now setup with the Github sponsors program. Will convert this bug into an enhancement request to support Brother label printers...