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OpenPrinting

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.

Announcement: Foomatic 4.0.3 released!

This release fixes several bugs and drops the foomatic-db-hpijs package.

As HPLIP ships CUPS-DDK-generated PPD files for some time and also added a CUPS Raster driver, we have decided to drop the foomatic-db-hpijs package as it is not maintained any more by HP and so the PPDs generated by it got out-of-date. PPDs for non-HP printers used with HPIJS are now generated by foomatic-db, via the driver entries "hpijs-pcl3", "hpijs-pcl5e", and "hpijs-pcl5c". For HP printers the new driver entry "hplip" was introduced to reference to the full HPLIP driver suite. The "hpijs" driver entry got dropped.

Under the bug fixes are a fix to make foomatic-rip working with LPRng, letting foomatic-rip convert PDF to PostScript with Poppler instead of Ghostscript, fixes on the JCL option handling of foomatic-rip, and fixes in the IEEE-1284 device IDs in the Foomatic-generated PPD files.

Google Summer of Code 2009: 5 students have done great work on printing!

After a successful Google Summer of Code 2008 the Linux Foundation is participating again as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code 2009 and OpenPrinting as one of the Linux Foundation's work groups has again offered many interesting student projects.

Here are OpenPrinting's projects on which students have worked this summer:

Common Printing Dialog: Most importantly, we have continued the work on the Common Printing Dialog, a dialog provided by the desktop to all applications, so that printing gets consistent all over. Students: Per Hermansson (GTK dialog), Alexander Wauck (Qt dialog)

OpenPrinting Database: Web App to Manage Driver/PPD Uploads: We also offered to one student to work on a web applications to manage the uploads of driver packages and PPDs by printer manufacturers and driver developers. These are supposed to be automatically downloaded and installed by Linux distributions and so a certain responsability has to be taken. Student: Kevin Seitz

OpenPrinting Database: Make the browsing web app MySQL-based to improve performance: Due to a constantly growing number of database entries and a constantly growing number of visitors the site based on CGI scripts which directly access the XML-based database suffers performance problems. Our solution is to mirror the XML database from the Bazaar repository into a MySQL database. Student: Subhankar Sett

Printer configuration backend for Oyranos: Print devices can be described by ICC profiles. These profiles should be communicated alongside the normal print pipeline. A module abstracting CUPS and other print spooler details for ICC profile communication would open the door of print previews for applications and configuration tools. Student: Joe Simon (Mentored by OpenICC)

See our project idea list for details. Congratulations and also thanks to all the students who worked on our projects in this Google Summer of Code!

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

• developing standard APIs for printing
• collecting information about printers and printer drivers and providing the drivers in distribution-independent packages
• integrating them in existing operating systems
• providing the tools for publishing printer drivers in distribution-independent packages
• Switching to PDF as Standard Print Job Format

OpenPrinting has merged with the former openprinting.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:

• OpenPrinting Meeting in Tokyo, July 2008
• OpenPrinting Meeting on the LF Summit in Austin (TX), April 2008
• OpenPrinting Meeting in Tokyo, Nov 2007
• OpenPrinting Summit 2007 in Montreal, Sep 2007
• OpenPrinting Meeting on the LF Summit in Mountain View (CA), June 2007
• OpenPrinting Summit 2006 in Lexington (KY), Oct 2006

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