OpenPrinting

By Linux Foundatio... - October 23, 2009 - 8:07am

We have resources to help with printing under free operating systems like GNU/Linux and the BSDs or under commercial UNIX-like systems such as Solaris and Mac OS X. Looking for configuration or driver help? Try our CUPS Quick Start or look for your printer in the OpenPrinting Database. For more detail, try Till's Tutorial. If all else fails, ask a human in the forums. Researching a printer purchase? Simply browse our database. Looking for software? We host Foomatic, printer driver packages, and some other programs. Want to help? Here's how.

New OpenPrinting CUPS Filter package released

Apple decided to not continue to develop and maintain the CUPS filters and backends which are not used by Mac OS X and moved them to OpenPrinting. They also did not accept the new filters for the PDF-based printing workflow as they are also not used by Mac OS X.

All these filters we continue to maintain now in one package, the OpenPrinting CUPS Filters and announce here the first release of a beta version of this package, versionn 1.0b1.

The package has its download place, BZR repository, and bug tracker (product "OpenPrinting", component "cups-filters") available on our servers now.

It allows for switching CUPS 1.5.x and earlier to PDF-based printing and it is required from CUPS 1.6.x on to make printing with filters and drivers available under Linux and other non-Mac-OS-X systems.

See also our page about PDF as standard print job format.

PDF as standard print job format is completely implemented on Debian and Ubuntu and will soon get upstream standard

From Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10, released mid-October) on all important desktop applications (GTK/GNOME, Qt/KDE, LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, ...) send print jobs in PDF and not in PostScript any more by default. In addition, a complete CUPS filter chain to process print jobs in PDF is available and used by Debian and Ubuntu.

CUPS author Mike Sweet/Apple have decided to not include the Linux-specific CUPS filters in the upstream CUPS source any more and we have agreed to maintain them at OpenPrinting. Here we will do some clean-up and discontinue the PostScript-centric workflow in favor of the PDF workflow, meaning that the upstream standard for CUPS under Linux (using CUPS plus our filter package) will be the PDF-based job processing, letting every non-PDF input be converted to PDF first, page management options being applied by a pdftopdf filter and Ghostscript being called with PDF as input.

Having this workflow we ask all driver developers kindly to not create any PPDs/drivers for non-Postscript printers which require exclusively PostScript. PPD files should at least accept PDF or CUPS Raster now. See also our driver design/packaging page.

More info on our page about the PDF printing workflow.

OpenPrinting successfully participated in the Google Summer of Code 2010

This year we mentored two students, Samantha and Daniel. A third student, Joe Simon, worked on support for color profiles in the Common Print Dialog, mentored by OpenICC.

All three students passed final review. Samantha and Daniel's code can be found at code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2011-lf/ , Joe's code is under the OpenICC repository: code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2011-openicc/

See past Openprinting GSoC Projects »

Making Printing "Just Work" - Volunteers and/or Sponsors needed!

For getting a great user experience with printing there is still a lot of coding needed. Your contribution, either work or funding, is highly appreciated. As we want our work to get a standard, we will let every completed project get into the major Linux distributions, so your work will help a lot of Linux users and will make Linux a better OS.

Enter the amazing world of free software and help fixing bug #1 of Linux.

Currently, we appreciate volunteers/sponsors for these projects:

Completing the Common Printing Dialog and Modifying Desktop Applications so that they use it: One of our projects we are working on is the Common Printing Dialog, one unified, feature-complete, easy-to-use (designed by OpenUsability) for all applications and desktops. To get ready-to-apply patches for KDE, GNOME and independent applications like OpenOffice.org, we need volunteers/sponsors to complete the implementations of the dialog and to patch the GUI toolkits and the desktop applications to use the new dialog via its D-Bus API.

Vendor WIN32/Mac OS X drivers made available to Linux applications:

Make many more printers working under Linux by creating a wrapper framework for the manufacturer's Windows/Mac OS X drivers, like the ndiswrapper for WLAN cards.

JTAPI implementation: The OpenPrinting workgroup has designed a Job Ticket API (JTAPI) already. You can help us by writing an implementation of this API (libjtapi). We especially also need an implementation of the JDF Job-Ticket.

Find more information and contact info on our project implementation page.

We appreciate your participation on these projects.

Second Generation of OpenPrinting Database Pages Online!

We have switched over to a new generation of web pages to browse and manage our printer/driver database. The pages are not only looking nicer and better fitting into the general web site of the Linux Foundation, they give also much quicker access by being backed by a relationale database and two mirrored servers and we will not get so many unuseful printer entry contributions any more as login with a Linux Foundation account is required for contributors now.

In addition we have now facilities for driver developers and printer manufacturers to easily contribute driver and printer entries via a web interface.

More info. Start browsing: Printers, Drivers

Enjoy the new OpenPrinting database web pages!

For Developers

The goal of the OpenPrinting workgroup is to develop and promote a set of standards that will address the complete printing needs of embedded, mobile, desktop, enterprise, and production environments, including management, reliability, security, scalability, printer feature access and network accessibility. This is achieved by

OpenPrinting has merged with the former linuxprinting.org and provides now a one-stop location for printing with Posix-style operating systems. OpenPrinting organizes several meetings throughout the year to bring the important people on the area of printing together. Meetings recently held are: