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, cups-filters, printer driver packages, and some other programs. Want to help? Here's how.

The next edition of our annual meeting, the OpenPrinting Summit is approaching! As usual it is held together with the PWG (Printing Working Group) Meeting, this time in Sunnyvale, California. 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 again integrated with the sessions of the PWG, an OS-independent standardization organization for digital printing.

Our annual meeting, the OpenPrinting Summit is approaching! This time it is held together with the PWG (Printing Working Group) Meeting in Toronto, Canada. 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 again integrated with the sessions of the PWG, an OS-independent standardization organization for digital printing.

This year two students are working on OpenPrinting projects:

• Daniel Dressler: IPP Everywhere for USB printers: Add IPP-over-USB support to CUPS/Linux
• Joseph Simon: Complete IPP Everwhere support of CUPS: rastertopdf filter to accept PWG Raster as input format

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.

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 have done some clean-up and have discontinued the filters for the PostScript-centric workflow in favor of the PDF workflow, meaning that the upstream standard for CUPS under Linux (using CUPS plus our cups-filters package) is 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.

Only exception is if the input data is PostScript and the printer is a PostScript printer or the printer driver requires PostScript as input. The we do not turn PostScript into PDF and back into PostScript but pass the PostScript through the pstops filter as before.

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 and on the cups-filters page.

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:

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 Printer Working Group: Print Job Ticket (PWG:PJT).

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

We appreciate your participation on these projects.

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

• creating a Common Printing Dialog for all applications and desktops
• 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 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:

• OpenPrinting Summit 2011 in San Francisco, April 2011
• OpenPrinting Summit 2010 in San Francisco, April 2010
• OpenPrinting Summit 2009 in San Francisco, April 2009
• OpenPrinting Meeting in Tokyo, July 2008
• OpenPrinting Meeting on the LF Summit in Austin (TX), April 2008
• OpenPrinting Meeting in Tokyo, Nov 2007

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