> forget all that driver nonsense

We have that, it's called Postscript. Too bad that lots of cheap printers don't implement it...

Postscript would partially complement PDF support, but Postscript still needs the help of a driver to talk to the printer. (Where does /dev/lp0 itself come from? The port driver.)

Sure, but we're talking "open a TCP connection to a port, send Postscript" and some slight variations on that theme (HTTP POST, USB, ...). Nothing like the jungle of printer drivers we have now.

I'd be interested to see some kind of printer driver as a service. Email a PDF to "mysecretprinterid@myprintercomany.com" and it prints the page

There are HP printers which do this.

I really like this idea, but it doesn't seem like quite a full solution. I wouldn't want to convert <i>everything</i> I want to print to PDF and then upload it to a web form.

Given the ubiquity of print-to-PDF on OS X, where there's literally a PDF button on every print dialog; this doesn't seem like an onerous requirement. XPS support might be more appropriate for the mass market, now that all editions of Windows 7 include the XPS printer.

Honestly, I don't print often enough for that step to be annoying, but how about if the printer exports a network share with a watch folder that prints PDF files that get put there. The workflow then is print-to-PDF, but save it to the bookmarked watch folder, and... printing happens!

Those sound like more steps in the right direction. The last one starts to sound like Dropbox: "It's a folder... that prints."

Not to be all full of stop energy or anything, but why would you want this over a print dialog?

Like he said:

> forget all that driver nonsense

I love Bonjour for this simple reason. Throw a Bonjour enabled printer on the network, and every mac in the joint will find it, set the drivers and you off. Window can do, if Bonjour is installed.

But I think Win 7 does a fairly decent job of doing this (without Bonjour) too. I don't know about network printers too. I don't use Windows much on the network.

To underscore the point, I've found Windows drivers come in two flavors. Either OS-specific - meaning Windows XP, Vista 32-bit, Vista 64-bit, and Windows 7 (both 32 and 64 bit as well), along with OS X and Linux (cough they're both CUPS), which means I have to download the drivers 4 or 5 times; or a massive 300 megabyte (bandwith is cheap, but that's just a bit big) download, and OS X/Linux is usually a separate download anyway. I don't even remember what hacks I had to do to get the drivers for all the flavors of Windows drivers to so other people could use my print server.

It's so much nonsense that if someone needs to print something, most people find it easier to copy the file to my computer and print it from there, rather than setup my (networked, auto-driver installing) printer on their computer.

I always thought network printers had some common protocol though. The optimal solution would be to enforce strict adherence to this protocol.

There's IPP, there's the printing part of CIFS, even plain old JetDirect (raw print data over a socket).

What's nonstandard is the ways of telling the hundreds of ink nozzles of various colors to produce a particular picture. There's of course PostScript, but it is only implemented in expensive printers.