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Google Summer of Code 2015: OpenPrinting projects

 

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Mailing list: printing-architecture at lists dot linux-foundation dot org

IRC: #openprinting on Freenode

OpenPrinting developer resources

Code License: See project descriptions

One of the most important features currently developed at Ubuntu is convergence. One operating system with one code base runs on desktops, serves, phones, tablets, TVs, appliances, … Especially one can connect a monitor to a smartphone running Ubuntu and it gets a desktop machine like a PC.

Naturally one can also print with this operating system and this should also work with the phone used standalone, with its own touch screen. We have already done a lot to approach this by making the printing stack ready for mobile devices, but what is still missing is the mobile print dialog.

We have already worked out how it is supposed to work and also design work was done, partially by OpenPrinting (code) and partially by Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu).

The dialog's GUI should follow the designs worked out so far and be done in collaboration with Canonical's design team.

The dialog should, as soon as it is opened by an app in order to print a job, start avahi-daemon and cups-browsed so that printers in the network get discovered, list the printers, let the user choose, poll the capabilities and user-settable options from the chosen printer via IPP, display the options in the GUI, let the user set them, send the PDF file of the job and the settings to CUPS, and stop avahi-daemon (the other daemons stop automatically when the job is done).

With this implemented, we have everything to print from a phone as described in our Blueprint.

Mentors: Till Kamppeter, OpenPrinting Manager, The Linux Foundation (till at linux dot com).

Desired knowledge: C/Cprogramming Code License: LGPL-2+   =====GTK (GNOME) Print Dialog: Support for driver-less printing on network printers, especially also IPP Everywhere printers===== cups-browsed is a daemon which comes with the [[:openprinting:cups-filters programming

Code License: MIT, GPL

Add printer output backends to MuPDF

MuPDF is a lightweight PDF renderer made by Artifex, the company behind Ghostscript. In contrary to Ghostscript, MuPDF is a pure PDF renderer. It does not contain a PostScript interpreter nor parts of it are written in PostScript. This makes it smaller, faster, and less resource-consuming, the ideal solution for mobile devices like tablets or smartphones.

On mobile devices printing will not be done with having tons of printer-model-specific drivers on the system. Once, they consume the limited mass storage space, and second, one uses the mobile device in several different local networks with different printers: At home, in the office, in a copy shop, … and one wants to use the printers which are available there, without installing drivers and setting up queues.

Therefore we want to have a system which automatically detects network printers and makes them available for local apps. To do so we restrict ourselves to printers with known, common languages: IPP Everywhere (Upcoming standard, PWG Raster and optionally some others) and PostScript, PDF, PCL 5c/e/6/XL (legacy standards). So MuPDF has to generate raster output for these languages, meaning raster embedded in the specifics of the language, and to avoid exhausting printer resources raster in small bands and no high-level output, even if the printer language is high-level.

Artifex will also work on this, but to get additional man power we are also opening this project for students.

Note that you have to assign copyright on your code to Artifex, as otherwise the code cannot be integrated in MuPDF.

This project can be split to be worked on by more than one student.

Mentors: MuPDF developers TBD, Till Kamppeter, OpenPrinting Manager, The Linux Foundation (till at linux dot com)

Desired knowledge: C and/or Cprogramming Code License: GPL =====Improve the pdftopvp filter to not need copying Poppler source code or unstable APIs and/or make it Ghostscript/MuPDF-based===== The cups-filters project at OpenPrinting (included in all Linux distributions using CUPS 1.6.x or newer) provides the filters needed to convert the print job output of desktop applications (usually PDF) into the printer's native language or into the universal CUPS/PWG-Raster format as input for a separate printer driver. It also provides the pdftopdf filter to apply page management (N pages per sheet, selected pages, even/odd pages for manual duplex, mirror for iron-on sheets, ...) to the PDF data stream. One of the filters is pdftoopvp which is the interface between PDF (the standard print job format under Linux) and the OpenPrinting Vector high-level printer driver interface standard. This standard is currently used by several Japanese-market laser printers which do not use PostScript as it is usual in Europe and the US. This filter currently only supports Poppler as PDF renderer and the connection between the filter and Poppler is rather awkward, copying parts of Poppler's source code and using unstable APIs of Poppler which change with newer Poppler versions. This makes maintaining the filter difficult for the Linux distributions. The task for the student is here to once improve the interface with Poppler if possible and also add support for Ghostscript (would improve color management a lot) and MuPDF (would improve integration with mobile and embedded devices). The tasks can be split up over up to 3 students (Poppler, Ghostscript, MuPDF). Mentors: Till Kamppeter, OpenPrinting Manager, The Linux Foundation (till at linux dot com), Koji Otani, BBR Inc. Japan (sho at bbr dot jp), Ghostscript developers TBD Desired knowledge: C and/or C++ programming Code License: MIT =====PWG Job-Ticket backend for libJTAPI (Job Ticket API)===== Job tickets are extended descriptions for print jobs. They tell which documents should be printed, on which type of paper, which resolution and quality, whether there should be sheets inserted between the documents, ..., and even information like delivery address, payment, ... A job ticket accompanies a print job from its submission to its delivery. Job tickets come from the professional printing world. In former times they were a paper form with instructions what everyone involved in the printing process has to do. Nowadays they are standardized files which are used by print servers, printers, and production printing machines. IPP Everywhere is a next generation printing protocol by the Printing Work Group (PWG) and uses job tickets for all printing metadata. This makes job ticket handling vital for IPP Everywhere support. For IPP Everywhere the PWG has created the [[ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/candidates/cs-sm20-pjt10-20120801-5108.07.pdf whereas the PDF interpreter of Ghostscript is written in PostScript (note that PostScript is a full-featured programming language), which makes Poppler smaller and faster. Ghostscript's advantage is having better color management and being better optimized for printing.

Unfortunately, one cannot freely choose between the two yet as Ghostscript has many important printer driver, especially “pxlcolor”/“pxlmono”, built in and so dropping Ghostscript in favor of Poppler would lead to a loss of important functionality, like PCL-XL printer support.

To avoid this we need to make all printer drivers working with arbitrary renderers. This is easy to implement for most modern drivers which are IJS plug-ins, separate filters, CUPS raster drivers, and OpenPrinting Vector drivers, but for the drivers built into Ghostscript this is not yet possible.

Therefore we want to modularize the built-in Ghostscript drivers into something which plugs into the renderer. A side effect of this is also the easier maintainability of Ghostscript and of the drivers, especially of built-in drivers from third parties.

As there are some high level/vector devices the suggested interface is the OpenPrinting Vector framework. The implementation should be some kind of glue code module which has on one end the OPVP interface to get the data from the renderer and on the other end the internal API of GhostScript to couple to the original GhostScript driver code. Compiling this should result in one or more OPVP drivers with the same functionality as the built-in GhostScript drivers.

Goal of this project is to implement and test this framework and it would be a plus to also do the needed modification of the Foomatic data to generate the PPDs for the modularized drivers.

Mentor: Hin-Tak Leung (HinTak dot Leung at gmail dot com), author of several drivers for printers with proprietary protocols; Till Kamppeter, OpenPrinting Manager, The Linux Foundation (till at linux dot com)

Desired knowledge: Knowledge in C programming is required. Great is also knowledge in PostScript and the Linux/Unix printing workflow.

Code License: GPL

 

Vendor WIN32 driver made available to Linux applications

There was a Google Summer of Code 2007 project under wine [1] to use WIN32 drivers to print from wine, and some adaption of that idea in some limited fashion in ddiwrapper [2]. It would be quite interesting and useful to properly integrate this into the more general printing workflow:

Currently there are two(?) frameworks which are usable for loading binary-only closed-source vendor driver modules, OPVP and IJS. There are a few other FOSS projects which uses some part of wine to load binary-only WIN32 modules for accessing data in proprietary format quite successfully - e.g. ndiswrapper (for wireless network hardware), mplayer (for multimedia playback).

Some background information is in [3]

Mentor: Hin-Tak Leung (HinTak dot Leung at gmail dot com), author of several drivers for printers with proprietary protocols; Detlef Riekenberg from the Wine Project, who was the mentor for the Gsoc 2007 wine project for print proxy, has agreed to be involved.

Desired knowledge: C programming

Code License: GPL/LGPL/Public Domain

Get the cairo color management code upstream

Adrian Johnson did a lot of the work needed to make cairo color managed. Finishing this work and getting the code upstream would allow us to simplify a lot of applications that use cairo. See http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~ajohnson/cairo/log/?h=color-space for the branch. Adrian has also patched Inkscape to use the new features, and that needs cleaning up and pushing upstream http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~ajohnson/inkscape/log/?h=color-space Also see http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2012-July/023353.html and https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list/2012-August/msg00084.html for more details.

Expectations: The cairo and inskcape code is pushed upstream with any required modifications. Ideally someone familiar with the cairo community would take this on, as Adrian found it hard to get the code approved upstream.

Skills: Understanding of basic color management, basic use of bzr and git, proficient in C.

Contact: Richard Hughes