[Desktop_printing] Common statements from the summit - list review

John Cherry cherry at osdl.org
Wed Apr 12 19:50:43 PDT 2006


The meeting focused on topics and suggestions to make print related
tasks much more easy to handle for Linux users as well as application
developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).  Participants
overwhelmingly agreed that the following fields will get most attention
in the next stage of development; specific working groups will be
established to drive these topics until the next Desktop Linux Printing
summit in 6 months.

These common statement are not a comprehensive summary, but rather
"speaking point" for the summit.  Consistent messaging is very important
as we move to the next stages for open source printing.

Printer and Driver Installation
-------------------------------
We want to achieve correct auto-discovery of printing devices and
auto-installation of  the matching driver based on manufacturer
implementation of IEEE 1284 device identification for direct connect and
network printers.

Comprehensive Status Reporting
------------------------------
We want to achieve a set of more meaningful feedback to users and
administrators from devices and drivers about printer status, job
status, and problems that have been encountered and to facilitate user
feedback.

Consistent User Experience
--------------------------
We want to define printing dialogs that are consistent in layout and
print options offered to the user across all applications and desktop
environments.

Print Dialog Extensibility
--------------------------
We want to design a platform neutral standard & API that allows
operating system, application and printer vendors to extend the common
printing dialog with their own extensions. 

We want to intensively explore the idea of a "printing dialog provided
as a desktop service" for use by applications and GUI toolkits to
construct print dialogs or to query for printer configuration
information.

Driver Development
------------------
Open driver interfaces such as IJS, OP Vector Printer and CUPS raster
are widely used.  We recommend all hardware vendors who have plans to
offer their printers for Linux customers to look into available Driver
Development Kits which would greatly simplify driver development for
Linux.

Print Job Data Format
---------------------
We want to move to PDF (ISO xxx) as the core format for print job
handling (while maintaining backwards compatibility with PostScript). 

Certification
-------------
We want to enable the printing ecosystem (printer vendors, Linux
distributors, integrators, etc.) by  providing a means to certify
printers and printer drivers against standard Linux capabilities (LSB)
rather than against all of the individual distributions.

Testing
-------
Linux distributors, printer manufacturers and the Linux community should
work together to make recommendations on a testing methodology for Linux
printing.  The goal is to establish a globally applicable standard for
Linux compatibility testing and certification of printing solutions. 

We would like to collect global testing results on linuxprinting.org and
make them available to the Linux desktop community.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Cheers,
John





More information about the Printing-summit mailing list