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? Start with suggested printers, or 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: Improving Printing under Linux!

The Linux Foundation is one of the organizations participating in this year's Google Summer of Code and OpenPrinting as one of the Linux Foundation's work groups is running the following student projects:

• 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 will code on their projects for 3 months full-time, from end of May to end of August. They will get funded for their work by Google.

We could not cover all projects proposed on our our project ideas page. Volunteers for the remaining projects are always welcome.

Thank you very much to all the students who have applied, everyone who stepped up to offer his mentorship and naturally also to Google. Let us all make printing under Linux just work!

Announcements/News

• Temporary failures of the database pages of the OpenPrinting web site (July 1, 2008)
• 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)

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.

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 »