1.2. History

This have been severel generations of the Printing HOWTO. The history of the PHT may be chronicled thusly:

1. Grant Taylor wrote the printing HOWTO in 1992 in response to all the printing questions in comp.os.linux, and posted it. This predated the HOWTO project by a few months and was the first FAQlet called a `howto'. This edition was in plain ASCII.

2. After joining the HOWTO project, the Printing-HOWTO was merged with an Lpd FAQ by Brian McCauley <[email protected]>; Grant Taylor continued to co-author the PHT for two years or so. At some point he incorporated the work of Karl Auer <[email protected]>. This generation of the PHT was in TeXinfo, and available in PS, HTML, ASCII, and Info.

3. After letting the PHT rot and decay for over a year, and an unsuccessful attempt at getting someone else to maintain it, this rewrite happened. This generation of the PHT is written in SGML using the LinuxDoc DTD and the SGML-Tools-1 package. Beginning with version 3.27, it incorporated a summary of a companion printer support database; before 3.27 there was never a printer compatibility list in this HOWTO (!).

4. In mid-January, 2000, Grand found out about the PDQ print "spooler". PDQ provides a printing mechanism so much better than lpd ever did that he spent several hours playing with it, rewrote parts of this HOWTO, and bumped the version number of the document to 4.

5. In mid-2000, Grant moved his printing website to www.linuxprinting.org, and began offering more powerful configuration tools there. He also converted the HOWTO to DocBook, and initiated coverage of CUPS, LPRng, and GPR/libppd.

6. In early 2001, Grant began using the GNU Free Documentation License, which seems quite suitable. He also began an effort to clarify what is and isn't Linux-specific; there are several free Unixlike kernels out there, and they all use the same printing software.

7. In early 2003, after listening to a presentation from Till Kampeter at FOSDEM, I (Dirk) decided to update this HOWTO. Since Grant last edited the HOWTO, CUPS has gotten more mature and a lot more popular.