Desktop Printing

Desktop Printing

 Printing on Solaris has been vastly improved in Solaris 10 with the introduction of the open standard Printing API. This API was worked on by Sun and the Linux printing systems (CUPS) maintainer as part of the Open Printing group. However, there is still work to make printing and printer administration a better user experience on the desktop.

GTK+ Print Backend for PAPI

 In GTK+ 2.10, printing support has been added. The default backend support provided by GTK+ 2.10 are file, lpr and CUPS. Since CUPS is not available by default on Solaris, and the features for file and lpr are rather limited, a PAPI backend implementation is desirable. With the introduction of this support, more and more applications on the desktop will be ported over to the new GTK+ API, moving away from the unmaintained libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui.

A GTK+ GUI for Solaris Print Manager

 The Solaris Print Manger (Preferences->Add/Remove Printer) uses a DtAction based GUI to get the root password before launching its GUI. This make the GUI rather inconsistent, and mixes a Motif based GUI with Swing on a GTK+ based desktop. Coupled with this is the desire to end of life CDE. The fix is to use gksu to obtain the root password before launching the actual Solaris Print Manager. More details are available in bug #6483813.

User's Printers Configuration Tool

 This is a simple editor that allows the user to configure his own list of printers and default printer. Since Solaris printing allows a user specific printer configuration file to be maintained as in $HOME/.printers, the use of a GUI tool minimizes the need to edit the file using a text editor. In a enterprise environments where the total number of the network printers can be overwhelmingly large, and it is highly inefficient for the user to have to sort through the long list the printer everytime he wishes to select a different printer to print to. Although the existing Print Queue Monitor already provided this functionality, it used the output of lpstat(1) which can be inefficient (may take up up minutes to list a few hundred printers). This implementation should use libpapi using only name services and should be significantly faster.

Single Print Tool

 This is proposed to be a full fledged project to provide a single GUI for the user to be able to perform all the printing related tasks. These should include the functionality of the Solaris Print Manager, Print Queue Monitor, User's Printer Configuration Tool (as above) to help improve the user experience. This project will be based on the work of the Presto project to improve approachability by automatically discovering and configuring access to directly attached, network, and remotely served printers.

Getting involved

 If you are interested in any of these tasks, contact the developers -

  Ghee.Teo@sun.com

 Calum.Benson@sun.com