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.
OpenPrinting successfully participated in the Google Summer of Code 2010
As part of the Linux Foundation we have participated in the Google Summer of Code 2010. Although we were not very successful in finding students for our projects, only having one single student working for us, this project was a success.
This one student was Vítor Baptista from Brazil, working on the project Compression of locally installed PPD repositories. The project is about developeing a compression method for PPD (PostScript Printer Description) files to make the footprint of printer hardware support in Linux distributions vastly smaller. With a small software package written in Python he reduced the space consumption of PPD files in an installed system by 10-20 times.
He also completed the problem in time for the Feature Freeze of Ubuntu Maverick (10.10.10, to be released on October 10, 2010) so that several MB of space on the live CDs clogged up by PPDs will be used for more translations or additional software this time (and even all PPDs which are part of Ubuntu will make it onto the CDs).
Congratulations and thanks to Vítor!
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.
Use SQLite for locally installed Foomatic Printer/Driver database: If you are setting up a printer under a modern Linux distribution, it always takes some time before you get the list of drivers (or before the printer setup tool selects the driver automatically). This is due to the slowness of the XML database used for the printer info. With a proper SQL database this will get much faster.
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:
