This tool is a simple printing provider demo, emulating some kind of printers.

This tool is mostly intended for testing purposes. Don't use it as a template for your own driver.

Is has no hardware dependencies, not does it output any kind of data. It just eats up the to be printed document and emulates the printing process by wasting some time and generating the printer and job states according to the emulation step.

Since it has no clue about the document content and its amount of pages, it always "prints" 10 pages (e.g. PAGES_TO_PRINT) in a full duplex manner.

It can emulate three kind of printers, you can select one from it via the command line option --printer or -p and a number from 1 … 3 when launching the tool.

Note: If you want to use the --printer command line option, the well known regular command line options for a printing provider must be given as well (e.g. --driver-ini and --parameter-dir) and follow the same rules.
Refer caps_pp_instance_runtime_prepare() for details. And refer caps_helper_driver_db_dir_fd() for the --driver-ini path info and caps_helper_device_db_path_create() for the --parameter-dir path info.

If you have defined a --driver-ini and --parameter-dir the corresponding INI files are read-in and you can control some additional - emulated - behaviour.

Section	Variable
emulation	warmup

Time in [sec] between the tools's start and the report the printer is now idle and ready to accept print jobs. It defaults to 5 seconds.

Section	Variable
emulation	print

Defines the time to wait to "print" each page in [ms]. Its value is partially used to delay the job state and printer reports about processing and printing on a per page base. It defaults to 750 ms.

Section	Variable
emulation	paper_empty_after

Defines the count of successfull jobs until the printer fails due to "out of paper". Once this tool enters the "out of paper" state, it must be re-started to continue the emulation. It defaults to 0, e.g. there is always enough "paper" to print to.

Section	Variable
emulation	paper_jam_after

Defines the count of successfull jobs until the printer fails due to "paper jam". Once this tool enters the "paper jam" state, it must be re-started to continue the emulation. It defaults to 0, e.g. there is never trouble with the "paper".

Note: Due to their implementation, you can't use paper_empty_after and paper_jam_after at the same time.