CUPS administrative guide

"The Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) is software that allows a computer to act as a print server, receiving print jobs from client computers, managing them, and sending them to the appropriate printer. It consists of a print spooler and scheduler, filters to convert print jobs to the format required by each printer, and a backend system to send the data to the chosen printer from client applications. Since every printer manufacturer does things differently, printing can be very complicated, and has always been a hard issue in the UNIX world for this reason. By providing a portable, modular printing layer, CUPS brings printing for UNIX into the modern age. It applies open standards for network printing through the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) and uses platform-independent drivers (Postscript Printer Definition, PPD) to print. Today, CUPS is the default printing system for a large number of Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) and UNIX-based operating systems"--Resource description page.