Captdriver is a free (as in speech) alternative driver for Canon printers that can only accept the proprietary CAPT data stream format. It aims to be a reliable and truly portable alternative driver. It's free and open source, so you can take part in its development, and help with expanding support, adding new features, and most importantly, maintaining its codebase.
As Captdriver is almost completely written in C, and uses the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), it is potentially compatible with any operating system with a working copy of CUPS, regardless of hardware architecture.
As a bonus for users on x86-64 hardware, Captdriver eliminates the need to install 32-bit libraries on your 64-bit operating system.
Captdriver is currently admittedly far from complete, but three printers are currently being recognised: LBP2900, LBP3000 and LBP3010. The driver is at a stage where compatibility and usability is subject to change on a regular basis, so check the three places: Releases, Issues, and the Wiki
This driver is based on the works of Rildo Pragana, Nicolas Boichat, Alexey Galakhov, Benoit Bolsee and Vitaliy Tomin. Special thanks to the other contributors who made this driver possible, and the folks who donated their spare time to test and review my edits!
This software must be manually installed. Please refer to Mounaiban's Captdriver Wiki for detailed instructions.
Details of the CAPT format are documented in the SPECS file.
While incomplete and expected to contain errors and omissions,
help with expanding it and making corrections is greatly
appreciated. Please also check the wiki for detailed information
not yet added to this file.
Please use this driver at your own risk. As with any software licensed
under the GNU General Public License 3.0, there is NO WARRANTY.
Full terms and conditions are detailed in the file named COPYING.
This is unofficial software not endorsed by Canon Inc. or any of its affiliates.
CUPS and macOS are trademarks of Apple Inc.
Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.