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 [3]. Looking for configuration or driver help? Try our CUPS Quick Start [4] or look for your printer in the OpenPrinting Database [5]. For more detail, try Till's Tutorial [6]. If all else fails, ask a human in the forums [7]. Researching a printer purchase? Simply browse our database [5]. Looking for software? We host Foomatic [8], printer driver packages [9], and some other programs [10]. Want to help? Here's how [11].
OpenPrinting Summit 2012 together with PWG Meeting at Apple in Cupertino on April 24-27
Our annual meeting, the OpenPrinting Summit is approaching! This time it is not on the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit but held together with the April PWG [12] (Printing Working Group) Meeting at Apple in Cupertino. We invite again printer manufacturers, developers of Linux printing components as CUPS, Ghostscript, Color Management, desktops, applications, of Linux distributions, ... to plan and discuss on making printing under Linux "just work". This time the sessions are integrated with the sessions of the PWG, an OS-independent standardization organization for digital printing.
See the OpenPrinting Summit web page [13].
foomatic-filters 4.0.12 released
We have issued a new release of foomatic-filters, this time for the following changes:
- SECURITY FIX: Use the mktemp shell command and the mkstemp() C function to create debug files with unpredictable names (Thanks to Tim Waugh from Red Hat for the patch).
- If the printer driver requires that incoming PDF has to be converted to PostScript, we use no Ghostscript by default and Poppler only as a fallback, as Ghostscript is more optimnized for printing and has more sophisticated color management.
Sorry for the high version number, the versions 4.0.10 and 4.0.11 got broken due to a bug in the release script.
Get the new version here [14].
First Stable Release of New OpenPrinting CUPS Filters package
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 stable release of this package, versionn 1.0.1.
The package has its download place [15], BZR repository [16], and bug tracker [17] (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 [18].
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 [19].
More info on our page about the PDF printing workflow [20].
OpenPrinting successfully participated in the Google Summer of Code 2011
This year we mentored two students, Samantha [21] and Daniel [22]. A third student, Joe Simon [23], worked on support for color profiles in the Common Print Dialog, mentored by OpenICC [24].
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/ [25] , Joe's code is under the OpenICC repository: code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2011-openicc/ [26]
See past Openprinting GSoC Projects » [27]
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 [28] of Linux.
Currently, we appreciate volunteers/sponsors for these projects:
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 [29] page.
We appreciate your participation on these projects.
For Developers
The goal of the OpenPrinting workgroup [30] 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
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creating a Common Printing Dialog for all applications and desktops [31]
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providing the tools for publishing printer drivers in distribution-independent packages [19]
OpenPrinting has merged with the former linuxprinting.org [32] and provides now a one-stop location for printing with Posix-style operating systems. OpenPrinting organizes several meetings [33] throughout the year to bring the important people on the area of printing together. Meetings recently held are:
- OpenPrinting Summit 2011 in San Francisco, April 2011 [34]
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OpenPrinting Meeting on the LF Summit in Austin (TX), April 2008 [38]
Announcements/News [40]