The GNOME community has not prioritized printing since the last galant efforts by Alex Larson and John Palmieri back in 2006. With the gradual adoption of GTK+ printing, the GNOME desktop has finally got all its components to use GTK+ print dialog in 2.22.0. With the unified application print dialog at hand, it is about time to move on to the printing tools. Currently, various distros come up with each unique solutions. While the existing tools are usable and are making steady progress, there is no such printing tools endorsed by GNOME as such.
The author proposes the following area for discussion:
- printer management tool that support major print systems such as CUPS, Windows and LP (with pluggable modules)
- examine the existing tools to enumerate the major must have and separate into nice to have features. The possible tools for evaluation include, gnome-cups-manager, gnome-cups-add, system-config-printer, and ospm-pm [1].
- consolidate the (possible) GSOC work on integrated printer management if the project does go ahead.
- create opportunities for the interested parties to work together.
[1] Most people are familiar with gnome-cups-manager, gnome-cups-add and system-config-printer as these have been around for sometimes. ospm-pm is at an early stage and there are useful features worth sharing.
