A minimal ipp protocol implementation (about 100 lines) to submit a document to a printer.

The printjob source code should be useful for use cases of driverless printing. Especially automated processes without user interaction should benefit from simple solutions like this. This code is not and will never become a full-fledged ipp implementation. I provide more control over print jobs, monitoring of printers and print jobs in my other project ipp-client-kotlin.

Directory demo contains the printjob.jar and a test script called go that submits a blank PDF to Apple's Printer Simulator. To avoid real printing, registered Apple developers can download Additional Tools for Xcode containing the Printer Simulator.

The tool takes two arguments: printer-uri and file-name. If you don't know the printer uri try ippfind.

java -jar printjob.jar ipp://colorjet:631/ipp/printer A4-blank.pdf

send A4-blank.pdf to ipp://colorjet:631/ipp/printer
version 1.1
status 0x0000
group 01
 attributes-charset (47) = us-ascii
 attributes-natural-language (48) = en
group 02
 job-uri (45) = ipp://colorjet:631/jobs/352
 job-id (21) = 352
 job-state (23) = 3
 job-state-reasons (44) = none
group 03

The equivalent java code is:

new IppPrinter(new URI("ipp://colorjet:631/ipp/printer")).printJob(File("A4-blank.pdf"));

The operation attributes group does not include a value for document-format by default. This should be equivalent to application/octet-stream indicating the printer has to auto sense the document format. You have to make sure the printer supports the document format you send - PDF is usually a good option. If required by your printer, you can set the document format programmatically by adding it e.g. after the printer-uri attribute.

writeAttribute(0x49, "document-format", "application/pdf");

If you use an unsupported printer-uri you might get a response similar to this one:

send A4-blank.pdf to ipp://localhost:8632/ipp/norona
version 1.1
status 0x0400
requestId 1
group 01
 attributes-charset (0x47) = utf-8
 attributes-natural-language (0x48) = en-us
 status-message (0x41) = Bad printer-uri "ipp://localhost:8632/ipp/norona".
group 03

You can use ippfind or dns-sd -Z _ipp._tcp (look at the rp value) to discover your printer's uri. If you have other issues contact me.

To build printjob.jar into build/libs you need an installed JDK.

./gradlew

I'd be happy to see this minimal ipp implementation being ported to all kinds of programming languages. On request I'll explain developers without experience in jvm based languages what the jvm runtime library is used for.