Future of direct printing

[steveblamey]

uzERP supports direct printing via the Internet Printing Protocol, but assumes a CUPS print server is installed on localhost. We also ship the unmaintained PHP::PRINT::IPP (http://www.nongnu.org/phpprintipp/) library.

PHP::PRINT::IPP requires some changes to work on PHP 8+ and there is https://github.com/slim-it-nl/php-print-ipp that continues to make the lib work. An alternative would be https://github.com/nateobray/IPP, which, although not a complete IPP implementation, provides a way to send documents to a printer and that is all we really use from PRINT::IPP. That said we do also enumerate printers from CUPS for convenience.

Possibly, we could decide to stop assuming CUPS on localhost and configure printer names and associated URIs within uzERP. It would then be possible to send documents directly to a remote CUPS server, Windows print server (configured for IPP) or direct to an IPP enabled printer.

[steveblamey]

I have updated printIPP to work under PHP 8.3 (see commit: 8f188ad).