CUPS final printing data for OKI ML 186 dotmatrix
 

I need to use CUPS in ubuntu to configure and print using OKI ML 186 printer. I dowloaded CUPS driver including PPD file rastertookidata filter which uses ghostscript to convert to epson print data format. I would like to know what would be the final print data content? Is cups generating it by character or it is a bitmap of entire page (graphic) ? Where can I find the final print data in filesystem ?

A long time since I played with dot matrix printers - I would expect the latter.

Most of the driver work by rasterizing the page(s) to be printed in a series of steps as outlined here

http://www.openprinting.org/download...2-Content.html

The final data will be as a series of bytes in a format (eg ESC/P) that the printer can interpret as graphical data for printing.

The CUPS pipeline is usually handled internally, but can be dissected as explained here

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_t...nting_problems
https://wiki.debian.org/Dissecting20...nting%20System

In addition, the cups documentation might help too. The final print data is not saved as far as I know but you could configure a virtual printer to capture the output.

https://www.cups.org/documentation.php
http://aplawrence.com/MacOSX/macosxcupstofile.html