At OpenPrinting we are proud to announce that the Linux Foundation is accepted and so we can offer our student projects:

• Lightweight tool for manipulation of PDF files for printing
• OpenPrinting web site: Creating a web app for managing new printer and driver entries
• foomatic-rip: Replace the universal print filter by an easy-to-maintain CUPS filter
• Foomatic: Improving the PPD generation capabilities
• Modularization of built-in GhostScript drivers into an OPVP driver
• Vendor WIN32 driver made available to Linux applications
• Job Ticket API (JTAPI) implementation
• JTAPI (Job Ticket API) JDF Job-Ticket Implementation

If you are a student and interested in doing a great project this summer, helping to get printing “just work”, and earning some money, please apply. The first candidates are lining up already.

This year we mentored two students, Samantha and Daniel. A third student, Joe Simon, worked on support for color profiles in the Common Print Dialog, mentored by OpenICC.

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/   , Joe's code is under the OpenICC repository: code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2011-openicc/

We are mentoring two students this year, Samantha and Daniel. They are implementing a monitored print server in CUPS, and rewriting portions of Foomatic's database support, respectivly.

A third student, Joe Simon, is working under OpenICC on the Common Print Dialog's (CPD) colour management.

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!