From The Linux Foundation
Contents |
OpenPrinting Working Group
Standardizing on a Scalable Print Environment in *nix,
a workgroup of The Linux Foundation
Mission Statement
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. We also develop new technologies about printing, add printing standards to the LSB, and run the OpenPrinting printer and driver compatibility database. We work together with printing hardware manufacturers, operating system vendors, printing system, printer driver, and desktop application developers to make printing "just work".
Invitation to Participate
Anyone wishing to participate in the OpenPrinting project either as an observer or as a contributor should join one of the mailing lists. There are no fees for participation or membership. Occassional face-to-face meetings are held in conjunction with the Linux Foundation and the PWG. See the Meeting Info page for events which have taken place or will take place soon. There are also links to slides and materials.
Future meeting plans are an OpenPrinting Summit every year in spring, usually together with a Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, two OpenPrinting Meetings per year on the Linux Foundation Symposiums in Japan, one meeting together with the PWG in fall, and also smaller meetings as needed.
Next meeting: OpenPrinting Meeting on the Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, July 8, 2008, Tokyo, Japan
Teams/Subprojects
- Steering Committee
- Architecture
- Asia/Pacific Regional Group
- Spooler/Job/Queue (PAPI)
- Capabilities
- Job Ticketing (JTAPI)
- Printer Driver
- Status Monitoring (SM)
- Print Channel Manager (PCM)
- Common Printing Dialog and application API (CPDAPI)
- PDF as Standard Print Job Format
- Foomatic Printer Database and Driver Integration
- OpenPrinting Testing and Certification Program
Documentation
- Making distribution-independent printer driver packages based on the LSB
- Web API for printer setup tools to query the OpenPrinting database and download printer drivers
- Documentation for the Foomatic XML database
- Documentation for the universal print filter foomatic-rip
Mailing Lists
- Architecture http://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/printing-architecture
- Asia/Pacific Regional Group http://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/printing-japan (in japanese)
- Foomatic http://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/printing-foomatic
Implementation
To implement our current projects we are mentoring 5 students at the Google Summer of code 2008:
- OpenPrinting database: Web-based (CGI) software for reviewing and triaging user-contributed printer entries and comments by Subhankar Sett, mentored by Till Kamppeter
- Common Printing Dialog by Alexander Wauck, mentored by Jonathan Riddell
- CUPS implementation of the Open Printing API by Cherif YAYA, mentored by Norm Jacobs
- Develop a DBUS interface for the common printing dialog by Lars Uebernickel, mentored by Jonathan Riddell
- Steps toward PDF as printjob transfer language by Tobias Hoffmann, mentored by Hin-Tak Leung
We could not cover all projects proposed on our our project ideas page. Volunteers for the remaining projects are always welcome.
See also an older call for interns and volunteers here currently nearly all the described projects are in the course to be implemented. We are only still missing volunteers for the JTAPI project.
We are also working together with Linux distributions to get our work applied. Here are three Ubuntu Blueprints for integration of OpenPrinting projects:
- Automatic download of printer drivers through the internet
- Common Printing Dialog
- PDF instead of PostScript as standard print job transfer format