What tools are using lprint?

[matthijskooijman]

I looked around a bit for tools that build on top of lprint, but I could not find anything quickly. Is there a list somewhere? Can people share what they know about?

In particular, I was looking for a small commandline tool to print labels with my Brother PT-E550W, with support for various styles of labels (one-off, equally spaced, cable wraps, cable flags, etc.) but could not find anything yet (only some tools that did just a little but only implemented a few specific printers). I'm pondering writing such a tool myself and tried using the ptouch cups driver (to automatically get support for a lot of printers), but I understand that cups will be removing custom driver support, and a separate print server like lprint is the way to go (also, cups has so many stacked filters that I could not manage to print bitmaps on my label printer because of some page size issue somewhere, so using something more lean and specific like lprint seems nicer). So I'm considering to do some hacking on lprint to get my PT-E550W working with it, but I am also wondering if there are existing commandline (or GUI) tools available to interface with lprint (so I do not need to reinvent the wheel, or at least have some existing tool for testing with).

[zdohnal]

One of the main purposes of printer applications like lprint or even the main purpose for them is to provide support of enhanced functionality or older non-driverless printers once CUPS drops driver support for CUPS to be able to pick them up by driverless means, so IMHO you should use CUPS tools and API unless you would like to reinvent a wheel.
Like lprint shares the queue via mDNS, so any tool can pick the record up and do the same thing as CUPS does, but that's exactly reinventing the wheel :) .

[michaelrsweet]

As @zdohnal notes, most users will probably get the most out of a CUPS + printer application combination since it offers full printing functionality.

LPrint itself (like most printer applications) can print images directly but not more complex files. In particular for LPrint, I intended the image printing and "raw" support for shipping applications since most commercial shippers can provide PNG or raw files for labels, and if you are automating that side of your business it is definitely lighter-weight than setting up a full CUPS install and managing that. Moreover, there are mobile applications for the various e-commerce solutions that support printing via AirPrint/IPP Everywhere/Mopria which LPrint also supports without adding a full CUPS install.