Free printer software for linux

printerpowerd project is a Daemon to automatically turn a printer on and off.

printerpowerd is a little Python script designed for users of older printers who want to save power when not using their printer, without manually turning it on and off.

It runs, checking the printer queue directory every five seconds, turns it on when it sees a job, and turns it off after a configurable amount of idle time.

It allows you to turn a printer on and off (when idle) using X10 or any other abitrary command.

system-config-printer purpose is to configure a CUPS server (often the local machine) using the CUPS API. The tool is written in Python, using pygtk for the graphical parts and with some Python bindings (pycups) for the CUPS API.
It is largely the same as using the CUPS web interface for configuring printers, but has the advantage of being a native application rather than a web page. It appears in the Fedora menu under System -> Administration -> Printing.
As a result of using the CUPS API the tool is able to configure remote CUPS instances and is not limited to configuring CUPS on the local machine. The CUPS library providing the API uses HTTP and IPP to communicate with the CUPS server.
Enhancements:
- Several improvements for the new-printer wizard have been made, and assorted bugs have been fixed.

PHP Printer Friendly Pages Generator Class is a PHP class that helps you create printer friendly versions of your page very easy.
All you need to do is to insert some custom tags in your pages, tags that will tell the script what needs to be printed from that specific page. An unlimited number of areas can be set for printing allowing you a flexible way of setting up the content to be printed
The output is template driven, meaning that you can customize the printer friendly versions of your pages by adding custom headers, footers, copyright information or whatever extra info that you find appropriate
The script can be instructed to transform links to a readable format (< a href="www.somesite.com" >click here< /a > will become click here [www.somesite.com]) or to remove img tags (< img src="pic.jpg" alt="picture" / > will become [image: picture] or just [image] if no alt attribute is specified)
The code is heavily documented so you can easily understand every aspect of it
See the manual for more info.
This script was inspired by PHPrint which can be found at http://www.tufts.edu/webcentral/phprint.
Enhancements:
- Extra content was not appearing in the correct position but at the end of the content.

Printbill is a sophistocated Unix print billing and/or accounting system with associated administration utilities. It primarily supports LPRng but now has limited CUPS support as well.
A simple print filter and accompanying daemon perform pre-printing billing, post-printing billing, print-accounting and print job quote generation. In addition, various utilities for administrators and users are provided - including programs to check your print quota and usage patterns, a web interface for both users and administrators and a command-line quote generator.
Charge rates may be specified on per-page, per-percent-coverage or both, and any number of printers/print queues can be provided (with different charge rates and printer parameters). Monochrome and CMYK colour printers are supported (with separate charge rates for both colour and black ink).
For all filters, processing can happen out-of-order, and you may prioritise jobs on the basis of size (jobs larger than a threshold can get lower priority or higher priority as desired) and jobs are billed in parallel / overlapping - jobs which finish billing first get printed first.
This is not necessarily the same as the order of arrival. Detailed stats are collected on a per-printer basis for job size, CPU time for each job, page count and ink/toner coverage, so you can analyse the usage patterns for your printers and predict when a cartridge will need to be replaced. It supports an optional user-supplied anything-to-postscript filter, so you can get properly billed for plain text, DVI files, image files, and so forth as well as PostScript.
Databases and configuration files may be stored on a centralised web server. This allows read-only access so that Unix (and conceivably Windows) clients could easily check quota, calculate quotes etc. remotely.
For fun, an additional filter is provided which allows users to deduct fixed amounts from their accounts (we use it to let students buy drinks and food from an unsecured laboratory fridge).
Enhancements:
- Finished support for per-user per-printer stats, tested that it works.

Print Plug-In provides a basic printing capability for The GIMP.
The current release supports PostScript, PCL (HP LaserJet and DeskJet), and ESC/P2 (EPSON Stylus Color) printers. The PostScript printer drivers handle PPD (PostScript Printer Description) files if you have them.
Using the Print Plug-In:
The Printer option provides selections for many common printers. Currently the print plug-in supports the following printers:
- PostScript printers
- HP DeskJet 500, 500C, 520, 540C, 600C, 660C, 68xC, 69xC, 850C, 855C, 855Cse, 855Cxi, 870Cse, 870Cxi, 1100C, 1120C, 1200C, and 1600C printers
- HP LaserJet II, III, IIIp, IIIsi, 4, 4L, 4P, 4V, 4Si, 5, 5FS, 5L, 5P, 5SE, 5Si, 6L, 6P printers
- EPSON Stylus Color, Color Pro, Color Pro XL, Color 400, Color 500, Color 600, Color 800, Color 1500, Color 1520, and Color 3000.
The Output Type option controls whether the printed output is in color or B&W (grayscale). This option is silently forced to B&W for grayscale images and B&W-only printers.
The Media Size option controls the size of the output. By default images are printed to fit the page and are automatically rotated to fill the largest area possible.
The Media Type option tells the printer what type of media is being used (Plain, Coated, etc). Not all printers support the media type option.
The Media Source option tells the printer which paper tray to print from. Not all printers support the media source option.
The Resolution option controls the resolution of the output. Not all printers support the resolution option.
The Orientation option controls whether the output is automatically rotated for maximum page coverage (Auto) or set to a specific orientation (Portrait or Landscape).
The Scaling option controls how large the printed image is. The default is to scale to a percentage of the printable area of the page. You can also specify an image resolution in pixels-per-inch (PPI) by clicking on the PPI radio button. The image is centered by default, however you can adjust the position of the image on the page by dragging the preview image.
The Brightness option controls the overall printed image brightness. A brightness of 100 is usually good for most B&W and PostScript printers, while most inkjet printers need a brightness between 100 and 120 for acceptable results.
Printing to a File
If you want to print to a file, select File from the Printer list. A file chooser dialog is displayed when you press the Print button. Warning, when you print to a file any existing file will be silently overwritten by this release of the plug-in!
Layered Images
Like most plug-ins, the print plug-in only reads the image from the active layer. If you want to print a composite of all visible layers you need to merge the layers (CTRL-M) and then print.
Supported Printers/Features
Most of the printer drivers in the print plug-in use the highest supported resolution for a printer, with the following exceptions:
- EPSON Stylus Color 600, 800, 1520, and 3000 - Currently the driver only supports 720 DPI printing in "compatibility" mode. This makes the drivers extremely slow compared to the Windows and Mac drivers. Unfortunately, I cannot provide optimized drivers (nor drivers for 1440x720) because of our NDA with EPSON.
- EPSON Stylus Photo, Photo Ex, Photo 700 - Currently the driver only supports 720 DPI printing in "compatibility" mode. This makes the drivers extremely slow compared to the Windows and Mac drivers, and you dont get the use of the light cyan and magenta inks (again, because of NDA restrictions.)

The PosteRazor project cuts a raster image into pieces which can afterwards be printed out and assembled to a poster.
As input, the PosteRazor takes a raster image.
The resulting poster is saved as a multipage PDF document.
An easy to use, wizard like user interface guides through 5 steps.
PosteRazor is available as a Windows and as an OSX version (it should also be compilable on Linux).
Main features:
- Input image formats.
- Image types.
- Dimension Units.
- Printer page layout.
- Poster size.
- Image tile overlapping.
- PDF output
Enhancements:
- Added: Polish translation by Grzegorz Wacikowski. This translation is included only in the Win32 version
- Added: French translation by Martin Loyer
- Added: +/- Spin buttons for poster size in pages
- Changed: Numbers in input fields are selected instead of changed on mouse drags. Should be more standard conformant.

Anyone who has spent enough time in Linux probably believes that you can never have enough control.

LPQ Control PHP script is a tool that parses the output of the lpq command and provides a web interface that allows you to remove print jobs from a printer.

You need to make sure that Apache can execute the lprm command. For a
default Apache installation, you will need to add the following line to
your /etc/sudoers file:

apache ALL=(root) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/lprm

This allows the PHP program to remove *ANY* specified print job.

Gutenprint project, formerly named Gimp-Print, is a suite of printer drivers that may be used with most common UNIX print spooling systems,
including CUPS, lpr, LPRng, or others. These drivers provide high quality printing for UNIX (including Macintosh OS X 10.2, 10.3, and
10.4) and Linux systems that in many cases equal or exceed proprietary vendor-supplied drivers in quality and functionality, and can be used for demanding printing tasks requiring flexibility and high quality. This software package includes an enhanced Print plug-in for the GIMP that replaces the plug-in packaged with the GIMP, and Ghostscript and CUPS drivers, as well as Foomatic data supporting the Ghostscript driver.
Gutenprint has been renamed in order to clearly distinguish it from the GIMP. While this package started out as the original Print plugin for the GIMP, it has expanded into a collection of general purpose printer drivers, and the new, enhanced Print plugin for the GIMP is now only a small part of the package. Furthermore, the name Gutenprint recognizes Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable type printing press. Finally, the word "guten" means "good" in German.
Gutenprint 5.0.0 is the first stable release of Gutenprint 5.0, and incorporates extensive feedback from the first release candidate. It
is based on the Gimp-Print 4.3 series that has been in development for over three years, and includes many improvements over the very popular 4.2 series.
Gutenprint currently supports over 700 printer models.
Enhancements:
- This release offers support for almost 70 new printers, full support for CUPS 1.2 (including extended attributes and on the fly PPD file generation), corrected support for borderless printing to Epson printers, the ability to choose resizing rather than cropping when printing from CUPS, and more.
- The Mac OS X binary is much faster in some cases on PPC Macs than the initial 5.0 binary.
- All users of Gutenprint 5.0.0 should upgrade.