printer

What This Skill Does

The printer skill serves as a robust bridge between the OpenClaw AI agent and your local CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) infrastructure. It enables the agent to directly interface with hardware printers, allowing it to interpret, format, and send documents to print queues seamlessly. By leveraging PPD (PostScript Printer Description) files at runtime, the skill intelligently detects specific printer capabilities such as available paper sizes, page margins, print resolution, and duplexing options. Whether you are dealing with multi-page PDFs or high-resolution images like PNGs, JPEGs, or WebP files, this skill ensures that output is scaled and centered according to the printer's native imageable area. It also provides advanced discovery tools to query supported media types, input trays, and specific CUPS options.

Installation

To install this skill, utilize the ClawHub installation manager provided in your OpenClaw environment: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/odrobnik/cups-printer Before installation, ensure that the CUPS service is running on your host system and that the necessary print drivers are installed for your specific hardware. Consult the accompanying SETUP.md file in the source repository for detailed platform-specific prerequisites and dependency management.

Use Cases

This skill is designed for scenarios where documentation, reporting, or creative output needs to transition from digital to physical form. Ideal for automated workflows where an agent processes a user request to generate a report, invoice, or image and needs to finalize that process by printing it. It is also highly useful for administrative tasks where an agent needs to confirm if a specific printer is online or to check if a specific tray is available before sending a large print job.

Example Prompts

1. "Check if the office printer is currently online and list the paper sizes it supports."
2. "Print the file located at /workspace/reports/invoice_final.pdf to the default printer using double-sided mode."
3. "Print my holiday photo at /tmp/vacation.jpg using the manual feed tray with high-quality settings."

Tips & Limitations

When dealing with PPD files that contain ambiguous command strings for input trays, rely on the media option flag (e.g., -o media=A4,tray-1,stationery). This bypasses standard PPD limitations by utilizing direct IPP-based routing. Always remember that file path resolution is restricted to the current workspace and the /tmp directory to ensure secure file handling. The skill strictly accepts PDF, PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, and WebP formats; attempting to print unsupported file types will result in an error.