OpenPrinting/Database/Foomatic

 

Contents

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• • 1.1 Using Foomatic with a particular printer and spooler

[] LinuxPrinting.org: Foomatic

Foomatic is a -driven system for integrating free software printer drivers with common spoolers under Unix. It supports CUPS, LPRng, LPD, GNUlpr, Solaris LP, PPR, PDQ, CPS, and direct printing with every free software printer driver known to us and every printer known to work with these drivers.

Foomatic ships in whole or in part in Mandrake/Mandriva >= 7.2 (full Foomatic from 8.1 on), Red Hat >= 7.1, Conectiva >= 8.0, Debian, SuSE, Ubuntu, and probably most other distributions.

[edit] Using Foomatic with a particular printer and spooler

Foomatic provides a universal filter script foomatic-rip which works with several spoolers, and a database describing printers and drivers the filter can use. To get your printer working with Foomatic, select the quick-start link for your spooler from this list:

CUPS

Foomatic works with all CUPS versions

LPR

Foomatic works with most strains of LPD, and LPRng.

PPR

Foomatic works as PPR RIP for PPR 1.50 and as interface for PPR 1.4x and 1.50.

PDQ

Foomatic works with version 2.1 or newer of PDQ.

No spooler

Foomatic's foomatic-rip can be invoked directly to print without a spooler.

Application Setup

Foomatic and vendor PPD files should also be loaded into client software including OpenOffice, the GIMP, GPR, or Windows or MacOS clients.

Be sure that you have the printer driver itself installed!
See also the tutorial chapter "" () for more detailed instructions with examples and screenshots. (Note that the instructions in the tutorial are for the former Foomatic 2.0.x.)

[] Full download

If you want to download the complete Foomatic, consisting of the Foomatic database, the print filters, and the software to generate PPDs and print queues, go to the .

Foomatic consists of four packages:

foomatic-filters

The universal print filter "foomatic-rip", used by spoolers to convert PostScript job data into the printer's native format as described by a printer/driver-specific PPD file.

foomatic-db-engine

Foomatic's database engine generates PPD files from the data in Foomatic's XML database. It also contains scripts to directly configure print queues and handle jobs.

foomatic-db

The collected knowledge about printers, drivers, and driver options in XML files, used by foomatic-db-engine to generate PPD files.

foomatic-db-hpijs

Foomatic XML data generators for HP's driver.

The latest packages are always the packages marked with "current" in their file names in the . They are a daily snapshot of Foomatic's Bazaar repositories, taken every night at 12:20am Oregon time.

These packages set up a local copy of the database on install; this is useful if you want to make your own backend or driver distribution, when you are administrator of a network with different printers and spoolers and want to have the same administration commands for all spoolers, or if you want to contribute to the development of the software and the database.

Please read the USAGE files in the main directories of the packages to know how to install and use Foomatic. Note that "foomatic-db" and "foomatic-filters" should be installed before "foomatic-db-engine", and "foomatic-db" also before "foomatic-db-hpijs".

You don't need to install all packages. You can install only "foomatic-filters" and use PPD files from PostScript printers or download the PPD files from OpenPrinting. You can also leave out "foomatic-db-hpijs" if you don't use the HPIJS driver or if you use the ready-made PPDs which come with HPLIP.

[] Bug Reports

Bug reports may be posted on the Foomatic development mailing list.

[] Roadmap

The current TODO list you find on our .

Detailed info about how Foomatic works, how the files are structured, and what is planned for the future you can also find in the README files of the "foomatic-db-engine" and "foomatic-filters" packages and in the tutorial chapter "Foomatic from the Developer's View: How does Foomatic work?" (). Note that the tutorial chapter still describes Foomatic 2.0.x.

[] Bazaar Repositories/Experimental Branches

If you're interested in easily being always up-to-date with Foomatic, you can get the latest state from our Bazaar repositories (You need to install the ):

bzr branch http://bzr.openprinting.org/devel/foomatic-db-engine
bzr branch http://bzr.openprinting.org/devel/foomatic-filters
bzr branch http://bzr.openprinting.org/devel/foomatic-db
bzr branch http://bzr.openprinting.org/devel/foomatic-db-hpijs

To update your Foomatic package copies, go into the main directory of the package which you wish to update and enter:

bzr pull

Bazaar is a distributed version control system. Every repository downloaded with "bzr branch" contains the full revision history and allows committing changes into it. A "bzr commit" commits into your local branch. For making changes getting back into the official Foomatic repositories on out site, you can either generate patches and send them to us or copy your downloaded and modified branch onto a web server and send us the URL so that we can merge it with our repositories. See the to learn more about using Bazaar.

There are also two experimental branches. Do

bzr branch http://bzr.openprinting.org/devel/foomatic-db-engine-experimental
bzr branch http://bzr.openprinting.org/devel/foomatic-filters-experimental

to get them. Note that these are more to hold some ideas of new development and they are perhaps not in sync with the standard branches or they are even not working.

A daily Bazaar snapshot lives in the ; you want the -current files.

You can also watch the development with a web browser via the web interfaces for the Bazaar repositories.

Development discussion happens on the Foomatic development mailing list.

See also the README and ChangeLog files in each package.

[] Contributing data or code

See our .