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 2008: 5 Students Worked Successfully to Improve Printing under Linux!

The Linux Foundation is one of the organizations who participated in this year's Google Summer of Code and OpenPrinting as one of the Linux Foundation's work groups has run the following student projects successfully:

• 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

The five students have coded on their projects for 3 months full-time, from end of May to end of August. They got funded for their work by Google.

We have more interesting ideas on our project ideas page. Volunteers are always welcome!

Thank you very much to all the students who have applied, who have actually coded, everyone who stepped up to offer his mentorship and naturally also to Google. We all worked towards making printing under Linux just work!

We will for sure participate also in the Google Summer of Code 2009.

Announcements/News

• We have a bug and feature tracking system now! (May 16, 2008)
• LSB-3.2-based driver packages: Gutenprint 5.0.2 and 5.2.0beta2, SpliX 1.1.1, lm1100, min12xxw, Update or LSB DDK to LSB 3.2, with SANE 1.0.19, CUPS DDK 1.2.3, new macro set, updated HOWTO (May 9, 2008)
• Google Summer of Code 2008: Improve printing under Linux! (March 19, 2008)
• Our Services are Moving Again! (February 29, 2008)

More Announcements »

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

• 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 Meeting in Tokyo, July 2008
• OpenPrinting Meeting on the LF Summit in Austin (TX), April 2008
• OpenPrinting Meeting in Tokyo, Nov 2007
• OpenPrinting Summit 2007 in Montreal, Sep 2007
• OpenPrinting Meeting on the LF Summit in Mountain View (CA), June 2007
• OpenPrinting Summit 2006 in Lexington (KY), Oct 2006

More for Developers »