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.

Google Summer of Code 2009: 7 students will 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 will work this summer:

Common Printing Dialog

Most importantly, we will continue 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), Svilen Kanev (application patching)

OpenPrinting Database: Web App to Manage Driver/PPD Uploads

We also offer 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. An idea is to mirror the XML database from the Bazaar repository into a MySQL database.

Student: Subhankar Sett

Job Ticket API: Implementing Job Ticket Support Library

Another interesting project is implementing a Job Ticket support library based on the , an API designed by OpenPrinting. Job tickets are metadata sets for print jobs. They can contain attributes on how a job gets printed (resolution, quality, ...) but can also contain data like delivery address, billing reference, ... so that they get even more interesting in professional environments, like print shops.

Student: Paul Victor

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 to all the students who made it into 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

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: