OpenPrinting/LinuxFoundation: "Hiring for Implementing PDF Printing Workflow"

Saturday, 8 September 2007  |  pipitas

Here is a recent announcement from the OpenPrinting workgroup, hosted by the Linux Foundation. It didn't receive any widespread publication, AFAICS. But it deserves to:

 
OpenPrinting/LinuxFoundation: "We are Hiring Students/Interns for Implementing the PDF Printing Workflow"

Posted by: Till Kamppeter
Date: August 29, 2007 09:08AM

One of the decisions which was made on the OSDL Printing Summit in Atlanta last year and widely accepted by all participants was to switch the standard print job transfer format from PostScript to PDF. This format has many important advantages, especially

  • PDF is the common platform-independent web format for printable documents
  • Portable
  • Easy post-processing (N-up, booklets, scaling, ...)
  • Easy Color management support
  • Easy High color depth support (> 8bit/channel)
  • Easy Transparency support
  • Smaller files
  • Linux workflow gets closer to Mac OS X

To turn this into reality work is needed in many components of the printing infrastructure. The japanese team of the OpenPrinting work group has already the needed CUPS filters in their Subversion repositories.

What is still missing is to make the universal print filter foomatic-rip (most printer drivers are integrated into the printing system with this filter) handling PDF input and to make the built-in printer drivers of Ghostscript also working with other renderers than Ghostscript, like XPDF/Poppler for example.

These two projects are now open for students or interns. If you like to take one of these challenges, go to the detailed project description and/or contact Till Kamppeter (till.kamppeter at gmail.com).

Till

OpenPrinting Manager
OpenPrinting (linuxprinting.org) Forum and web site administrator


You can also look at a more detailed project description.