TL;DR: I made a Xerox WorkCentre 6515dn PPD file and tested it working with CUPS on Debian.

So, I bought a fancy multifunction scanner/printer: the Xerox WorkCentre 6515dn – solid gear all around, considerably more so than the damned Canon i-SENSYS MF724Cdw it replaces. But, as usual, great hardware is nothing without software support – and Xerox came short…

First, no PPD file was to be found anywhere on the Web. The Xerox workaround: “The Generic ppd is listed in Windows downloads, so it is packaged as an EXE, but it’s just so it runs self extraction. So download and run on Windows, or within WINE or some such to grab the filles from it. Grab it here ! – fine, I found an old Windows host and used it to get the file… But why couldn’t they make that file available for download somewhere on their par-for-the-course labyrinthine support site is anyone’s guess.

Anyway, I declared the printer to CUPS and gave it that painfully extracted PPD… No luck: CUPS rejected it with the error messageĀ “Unable to open PPD file: OpenGroup without a CloseGroup first”. Here is the full diagnostic:

$ cupstestppd xr6515dn.ppd.orig
xr6515dn.ppd.orig: FAIL
**FAIL** Unable to open PPD file – OpenGroup without a CloseGroup first on line 476.
REF: Pages 45-46, section 5.2.
WARN Non-Windows PPD files should use lines ending with only LF, not CR LF.

Oh well, a PPD is just a text configuration and “open without close” problems feel familiar to anyone who has ever fed parenthesis to a computer. So, after five minutes of tinkering:

$ diff xr6515dn.ppd.orig xr6515dn.ppd
475a476,477
> *CloseGroup: /Paper/Output
>

And it works too:

$ cupstestppd xr6515dn.ppd
xr6515dn.ppd: PASS
WARN Non-Windows PPD files should use lines ending with only LF, not CR LF.
WARN Size “215×315” should be the Adobe standard name “FolioSP”.
WARN Size “B6” should be the Adobe standard name “ISOB6”.
WARN Size “4x6Postcard” should be the Adobe standard name “4×6”.
WARN DefaultGuaranteedMaxSeparations has no corresponding options.

Morale of the story: my fancy paper-processing device now nicely prints from the house’s Debian workstations and the Web is now richer with a Xerox WorkCentre 6515dn PPD file tested working with CUPS on Debian !