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Writing your own CUPS printer driver in 100 lines of Python (2018)

Behind the scenes blog of pretix, your friendly ticketing system from next door.

Last year, I took a closer look at this market and tested devices from two of the major ticket printer vendors: The BOCA Lemur as well as the Practical Automation uITL+2003CF model. The uITL+ is missing a network port in contrast to the BOCA Lemur, but the uITL+ features a nicer case (smaller and metal instead of plastic) and is way more affordable to obtain, at least here in Europe. Usually, most CUPS filters are written in C, but I decided to choose Python instead – not only because I know it better, but also because writing it in a compiled language also means that we need to cross-compile it to different architectures like ARM if we want to run it on devices like the Raspberry Pi, which creates additional effort.

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