For a survey of ports and protocol to print via a mobile or stationary printer see the Different Environments chapter below.
CANON : BJC-80 (this printer can also be used as a scanner with the optional scan head!) David F. Davey wrote: "I finally have a Canon BJC-80 printer working properly with IrDA®. By properly I mean as a pseudo-PostScript device by way of ghostscript and a modified lpd.
How:
linux-2.2.7-ac2-irda6
/proc/sys/net/irda/slot_timeout increased to 10 (essential or discovery fails)
ghostscript DEVICE set to bjc600
printcap includes:
:xc#01777777:\ :fc#017:\ :fs#020000010002:
and lpd had to be modified to accept the ulong fs and to handle xc (which is documented but not coded in the lpd's I have looked at). "
For further information look at his page BJC-80 .
Tim Auckland wrote: Would my version of lpd help? unixlpr is a portable version of the lpr/lpd suite, compatible with traditional versions and RFC 1179 and with a couple of minor extensions, including the :ms= field (also seen in SunOS 4) and the ability to print directly to TCP connected printers without needing special filters. ms allows you to configure the tty using stty arguments directly, so if stty can handle the extended flags, my lpd should handle IrDA® out of the box. You can find the latest unixlpr here .
CANON : BJC-50 65% of the size of the BJC-80, Li-Ion battery included, and basically the same features as the BJC-80.
CANON : BJ-30
Citizen : CN-60
Pentax : Pocketjet
HP: DeskJet 340Cbi. This is a small, portable, low-duty-cycle printer. It prints either black, or color (3 color). I have had some problems with it loading paper. Overall, the small size and portability make it a nice unit for use with laptops. I use the HP 500/500C driver with Linux.
Olivetti: JP-90
MaxPoint : TravelScan, mobile scanner for the PCMCIA port.
AFAIK only the HP DeskJet 340Cbi and the BJC-80 machine have an infrared port. Pay attention to the supplied voltage of the power supply if you plan to travel abroad. I couldn't check the scan functionalities with Linux yet.
SANE stands for Scanner Access Now Easy and is an application programming interface (API) that provides standardized access to any raster image scanner hardware (flatbed scanner, hand-held scanner, video- and still-cameras, frame-grabbers, etc.). The SANE standard is free and its discussion and development is open to everybody. The current source code is written for UNIX (including Linux) and is available under the GNU public license (commercial application and backends are welcome, too, however).
GOCR is optical character recognition software. It converts PGM files into ASC files.
For scanner drivers see Linux Drivers for Handheld Scanners.
There are different ways to connect a printer or scanner to a laptop. For printers usually: parallel port, serial port, USB and IrDA® port. For scanners usually: parallel port, SCSI (via PCMCIA or generic SCSI port), USB and PCMCIA port. All of them need the appropriate kernel drivers.