From The Linux Foundation

OpenPrinting Meeting on the Linux Foundation Japan Symposium in Tokyo, Japan, July 2008

Where: Linux Foundation Office in Tokyo

When: Tuesday, July 8, 9:30am-5:00pm

Participants

Till Kamppeter, OpenPrinting Manager, The Linux Foundation
Peter Sikking, OpenUsability, Leader of the UI design project for the Common Printing Dialog
The OpenPrinting Japan workgroup
Representatives/Engineers of the printer manufacturers (TBD)
Members of the Linux Foundation (TBD)
Other interested parties (TBD)

Call-in Participation

For everyone who cannot attend in person we try to set up call-in access to the meeting. Please call in at any time during the meeting (9:30am - 5pm Tokyo time or 12:30am - 8am UTC/GMT or MONDAY 5:30pm - Tuesday 1am in San Francisco) using the following phone number:

+1-218-936-7999

and the access code

546639#

Agenda

**July 8**
9:30am - 10:00am	Introduction Till Kamppeter, OpenPrinting Manager, The Linux Foundation (Slides)
10:00am - 12:30pm	The Common Printing Dialog Peter Sikking, OpenUsability Till Kamppeter, OpenPrinting Manager, The Linux Foundation Peter Sikking, leader of the user interface design development of the Common Printing Dialog will show a first prototype of the dialog. We will also present the specifications of the UI design, the application interface and the user interface control from, the driver side, via PPD files. We will discuss the specs so that they can get finalized. Peter's abstract: ’Printing that just works’ is the vision of the openPrinting project, run by the linux foundation. Changing the printing experience from a liability to an asset, for every linux desktop out there. There is full support from every printing manufacturer for this project. The printing dialog is an important part of that. The current versions on GNOME andKDE were found to ‘just not work’ (in a usability sense) and the usability and interaction professionals of openUsability got involved. The redesign project that followed led to the first innovation in printing UI since 1995 on any platform, it was probably in the 80’s that a interaction professional was actually involved with the printing experience. The principal interaction architect of the project shows in this talk the complexities involved, why ‘printing does not exist,’ what is wrong with printing dialogs today and the innovation to overcome that. The latest designs and first implementation of the dialog (if we’re lucky) is shown. (Peter's UI design presentation as blog) (Slides about the specifications) More info
12:30pm - 1:30pm	Lunch
1:30pm - 2:30pm	Auto-Downloadable Distribution-Independent Driver Packages Till Kamppeter, OpenPrinting Manager, The Linux Foundation Status report and discussion The driver packages themselves (Is LSB DDK OK? Or is there still something needed) The database server (database and contribution management, indexing, signing, PPDs vs. packages, data provided by the database) The client tools (system-config-printer, Jockey, ...) (Slides)
2:30pm - 2:45pm	Coffee
2:45pm - 3:45pm	PDF as Standard Print Job Format Till Kamppeter, OpenPrinting Manager, The Linux Foundation Status of the CUPS filters and integration of the filters in Linux distributions Status report from OP Japan and also about the work of GSoC student Tobias Hoffmann Integration of the filters in Linux distributions (copy of library sources) Non-latin text support in textopdf (fonts, ...) Problems with PDFs with DRM and conversions of them by print filters (Slides)
3:45pm - 4:45pm	Discussion
4:45pm - 5:00pm	Wrap-up

Action Items

PPD extensions: Need to specify Widgets, beginning with a PPD keyword telling which kinds of widgets or widget combination are preferred for an option, like radio buttons, drop-down list, or buttons for enumerated choice, check box, radio buttons, toggle button or drop-down list for boolean, input field, slider, and/or spin button for numerical, ... Also hints like including or suppressing a history drop-down at an input field. Also more complex widgets should be possible, for example by JavaScript or even embedded web pages from the print server (with CUPS as web server).
Improve Dialog Localization. Currently we can only translate text into a given language. Localization for icons and localization by region was suggested.
Add Extra Wiki page for fallbacks when using old PPDs.
Dialog Implementation (Need to consider): Flip dialog layout on right-to-left Language
Contact Adobe through LF legal person or J.Zemlin for handling of DRMed PDF files in PDF printing workflow.
Otani/Olaf contact to get libpoppler-dev fixed (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, SUSE, RedHat, Mandriva)
- only the poppler development packages of Fedora 7 and 8 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x are affected. Fedora 9 is OK. Bug report filed with Red Hat requesting a fix in the next release.
- OPFC PDF filter packages will be fixed to reflect the above findings.
"texttopdf" font usage for non-Latin languages: Use fontconfig if available, otherwise use own config file.
OpenPrinting DB Rating system: Split user/vender rating, clarify criteria

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