cups2pegg - The CUPS Plugin for pegg HOWTO

What is this all about

In this howto i will describe how you can add your custom label dimensions
to the cups2pegg plugin.

What will I need ?

The folowing things are needed:

The CUPS Driver Development Kit (DDK) available on the CUPS Homepage.
Your favourite text editor
some time

From the CUPS DDK you will only need the ppd-compiler (ppdc). This tool will use the drv files
included in the cups2pegg tarball to generate a corresponding ppd (Postscript Printer Description).
These files include the neccessary information to handle postscript printers within cups.
Of course our labelprinters are not postscript printers but the cups2pegg backend accepts a
postscript document as an input which is converted into a raw-file that can be
sent to the printer using pegg or pegg_el.

What to do ?

Assuming that you have already the dimensions of your desired label in pixels (if not then you
must calculate those. These printers have 200dpi resolution), you can start editing the drv file.

For this open the drv file (included in cups2pegg-v0.21a.tar.gz) which matches your printer.

Locate the folowing section (The name "500_64/Kraft_XE-u3A_miniDV" is only an example):

    CustomMedia "500_64/Kraft_XE-U3A_miniDV" 500 64 0 0 0 0
        "<</PageSize[500 64]/ImagingBBox [500 64]>>setpagedevice"
        "<</PageSize[500 64]/ImagingBBox [500 64]>>setpagedevice"

Now add your label size. For this copy the section and rename it using your label name
and change the geometry. For example here we have a section for a label namend "My_own"
this label has a width of 455px and is 128px high.
```
    CustomMedia "455_64/My_own" 455 128 0 0 0 0
        "<</PageSize[455 128]/ImagingBBox [455 128]>>setpagedevice"
        "<</PageSize[455 128]/ImagingBBox [455 128]>>setpagedevice"
    
```
As you can see it is very important to add the geometry to the name. This information is
used by the backend to convert the imagedata.
save the modified ppd file and compile it using ppdc (make a backup of the original ppd files first !
After the compilation is done you can find the new ppd-file in the ppd -subdirectory.
Next copy your new ppd file to the cups ppd directory (eg. /usr/share/cups/model)

You can now use your own label geometry.