No hassle with the Adobe EULA.

No hassle with the question, “Where do I get the ADOBE*.* driver files?”

The Adobe drivers (on request of the printer PPD associated with them) often put a PJL header in front of the main PostScript part of the print file. Thus, the print file starts with <1B >%-12345X or <escape>%-12345X instead of %!PS . This leads to the CUPS daemon autotyping the incoming file as a print-ready file, not initiating a pass through the pstops filter (to speak more technically, it is not regarded as the generic MIME-type application/postscript , but as the more special MIME type application/cups.vnd-postscript ), which therefore also leads to the page accounting in /var/log/cups/page_log not receiving the exact number of pages; instead the dummy page number of “1” is logged in a standard setup).

The Adobe driver has more options to misconfigure the PostScript generated by it (like setting it inadvertently to Optimize for Speed instead of Optimize for Portability, which could lead to CUPS being unable to process it).

The CUPS PostScript driver output sent by Windows clients to the CUPS server is guaranteed to autotype as the generic MIME type application/postscript , thus passing through the CUPS pstops filter and logging the correct number of pages in the page_log for accounting and quota purposes.

The CUPS PostScript driver supports the sending of additional standard (IPP) print options by Windows NT/200x/XP clients. Such additional print options are naming the CUPS standard banner pages (or the custom ones, should they be installed at the time of driver download), using the CUPS page-label option, setting a job priority, and setting the scheduled time of printing (with the option to support additional useful IPP job attributes in the future).

The CUPS PostScript driver supports the inclusion of the new *cupsJobTicket comments at the beginning of the PostScript file (which could be used in the future for all sorts of beneficial extensions on the CUPS side, but which will not disturb any other applications because they will regard it as a comment and simply ignore it).

The CUPS PostScript driver will be the heart of the fully fledged CUPS IPP client for Windows NT/200x/XP to be released soon (probably alongside the first beta release for CUPS 1.2).