Analysis of Canon CAPT protocol for Linux printer support improvement

Abstract

The following paper discusses major deficiencies found in Canon’s own proprietary Advanced Printing Technology(CAPT) driver for Linux distributions. It points out the existence of experimental, but more clean and completely opensource driver based on several previous reverse engineering attempts and poses a problem of its incompatibility with aparticular printer model (LBP3000 in this case) in question. Then it proceeds to describe the effort of analysis throughobservation of captured conversation between Canon's own proprietary driver and the printer to point out thedifferences between the inner workings of original and open source drivers. Finally, it describes the implementation of printer's support in an open source driver and concludes with the successful result of producing a driver that is able to work under modern Linux distributions and share a CAPT printer on a heterogeneous local area network.