A New Approach to Printing with Google Cloud Print

Where was this ten years ago when I needed it? I worked for a electronic medical records ISV, and we had requirements like: Print referral letters on regular paper, chart notes on paper with a special blue line on the edge, and prescriptions on a special printer. Our thick Java Swing client was at the mercy of an admin to configure each workstation correctly. Even then, we could not easily do things like print to an alternate printer when the primary one was not working.

I had envisioned some sort of document printing service which could receive a request from our back-end services to render and print, say, a RTF document using a specified set of print rules (paper requirements, micro-geographic preferences, etc.).

If you readed the linked article, it says it could work offline, the whole protocols are open source.

Read http://code.google.com/apis/cloudprint/docs/overview.html

And, finally, the number one question people ask is, "How do the printers communicate with Google Cloud Print?" The answer is, "It depends on whether the printer is a cloud-aware printer or a legacy printer."

They're proposing a proxy for legacy printers in Chromium (that makes Windows/Mac OS X/Linux printers available to Cloud Print). They're also proposing that new printers add native Cloud Print functionality.

For Chromium OS, it seems like it will only be able to use new printers or legacy printers with specific proxy devices.

Hmm, I could see this working in an Airport Express USB print kind of way; but too bad, Airport Express still requires the printing origin computer to have the printer drivers. If Apple (or anyone else for that matter) Express can support cloud print, that would be so much nicer.