| Group plots Desktop Linux printing improvements |
Apr. 18, 2006
If you think setting up and using a printer in Linux is too much trouble, take heart -- you're not alone. To come to grips with a wide range of Linux printing-related issues, the OSDL-sponsored Portland Project has just held the first Desktop Linux Printing Summit in Atlanta.
The meeting was attended by about 40 developers from printer vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard, Lanier, and Lexmark; to operating system distributors like Apple Computer, Debian, and Novell; to those two Linux desktop powers, GNOME and KDE; and more. Their job? To nail down exactly what's wrong with printing and Linux, and to work out ways to resolve these problems once and for all.
It's a big job, but judging by early reports from KDE developers Cristian Tibirna and Kurt Pfeifle, and Intel Linux client architect Waldo Bastian, things went extremely well.
The "Portland spirit" of everyone working together to solve common problems -- rather than wasting time and energy on "Whose approach is the best approach?" -- seems to be alive and well.
The results were, as OSDL Desktop Linux initiative manager John Cherry, with some assistance from GIMP developer Robert L. Krawitz, put it, a list of areas that "will get [the] most attention in the next stage of development."
Specifically, the following goals were identified: Administration and Installation
- Printer and Driver Installation -- at the top of the list, the group wants to achieve correct auto-discovery of printing devices and auto-installation of the matching driver based on manufacturer implementation of IEEE 1284 (the Parallel Port Standard) device identification for direct connect and network printers.
- Comprehensive Status Reporting -- The programmers also want to give 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.
User Interface
- Consistent User Experience -- The developers want to define printing dialogs that are consistent in layout and print options offered to the user across all applications and desktop environments.
The point here, as every Linux desktop user knows, is that there's little consistency in how KDE, GNOME, Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice.org, etc. present print dialogs.
- Print Dialog Extensibility -- Next, they want to design a platform neutral standard and API (application programming interface) that allows operating system, application, and printer vendors to extend the common printing dialog with their own extensions.
This point was one near and dear to the printer vendors' hearts. It's simple to bring basic printing functionality to Linux by using industry standard PPD (PostScript Printer Description) files or IJS (an open-source raster printer driver architecture based on HP open-source), but there's no common interface to let a Linux system present complex options for high-end printers to a user.
The group also wants 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.
Developer Support / API
- Driver Development -- Since open driver interfaces such as IJS OP Vector Printer and CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) raster are widely used, the group is recommending that all hardware vendors with plans to offer their printers for Linux customers look into providing Linux Driver Development Kits, which would greatly simplify driver development for Linux.
- Print Job Data Format -- The group wants to adopt PDF (ISO xxx) as the core format for print job handling, while maintaining backwards compatibility with PostScript. This is a major change. As Pfeifle points out, "Linux printing is still centered around this legacy format, and all non-PostScript devices are only supported by converting PS to the printer's native raster or PCL (printer control language)."
At the same time, there's still debate within the group on exactly which versions of PDF should be supported by the Linux desktop first. Some of the PDF versions under discussion include PDF/A, PDF/X-3, PDF/X-2 or PDF/X-1. (For more on PDF, visit DesktopLinux.com's sister publication, PDFZone.)
Certification
- Certification -- They also 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 (Linux Standard Base) rather than against all of the individual distributions.
As Pfeifle observed: "When buying a printer, choice is difficult; many models do not work perfectly with Linux; [on the other hand], many work fine, but they don't say so on the box; some do carry a Tux logo on their wrapping, but very often the manual doesn't say how to install the driver; some come with proprietary drivers which do not blend in well with CUPS, or which do not install on all distributions. Searching [the] Linuxprinting.org database is a too complicated step for many [users] to succeed in.
- Testing -- As part of solving this compatibility problem, the group is working toward getting Linux distributors, printer manufacturers, and the Linux community to 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.
These global testing results would then be collected and kept on linuxprinting.org, for access by the Linux desktop community.
This is an ambitious agenda. The group will handle this, Cherry said, by establishing "specific working groups ... to drive these topics until the next Desktop Linux Printing summit in six months."
Still, with developers from all sides of Linux desktop printing collectively putting their shoulders to the wheel, the group hopes that substantial progress will be made by the next Desktop Linux Printing Summit.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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