Mopria Alliance is a non-profit membership organization of leading global technology companies with the mission of providing universal standards and solutions for print and scan.
Founded in 2013 by Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, it has grown to 21 members representing the worldwide printer and scanner business.
The terms “non-profit” and “universal standards” evoke an image of the noble intention to overthrow proprietary solutions and enable open source access to print and scan services. Indeed a welcome gift to any FOSS developer. I already envision SavaPage being a Mopria Compliant printer and capturing scans from Mopria Compliant scanners.
Unfortunately, it’s not what it seems. The standards are available to Mopria Alliance member companies only and hidden behind a $30,000 annual membership paywall.
So what are these “universal” standards really like? Does Mopria offer proprietary print services from Android and Windows 10 after all? And what about Linux support?
Maybe it’s interesting to look at the air-print standard. Most modern printers are supporting it. I have good expierences with it, and not only with wifi, also with UTP-cables. Routing is a bit complex, but there are ways around. Not sure it will support all features of a complex printer.
@paul Thanks for your response and welcome to our community! I agree, AirPrint is a far better option, since it’s based on open standard mDNS. SavaPage supports AirPrint by means of Avahi so you can easily Print to SavaPage from iOS. Printing from Android and Chrome OS is less straightforward. Yes, SavaPage is a Google Cloud Ready Printer, but sending a print job via Google cloud is not an guarantee to privacy. Mopria seemed a promising alternative. If SavaPage could act as Mopria Compliant Printer, Android users could just install the Mopria app to directly connect to SavaPage. But, no way to make that happen. “Reverse engineering considered harmful” . I tested several generic Android printing apps, but they all have their own drawbacks. So I’m investigating how to build a dedicated SavaPage Print App aiming to be part of F-Droid. I’ll keep our community informed…
So far I know you can say: every air-print printer is usable as printer for cups, so for Savapage. Plug-and-play, without driver. There are 2 things important: 1. the printer has to be in the same network as Savapage, or you need something to route it (a Raspberry Pi or something like that). 2. The firewall of the machine running Savapage has to be open for mDNS (port 5353 UDP).
Not sure if an air-print printer what has a scanner, can also act without driver as a scanner for Savapage. Would be nice!
@paul If the scanning function of a networked MFP can be controlled with SANE API, SavaPage could start a scan, even with ADF (Automatic Document Feeder). The scan result could then be previewed in the User Web App, ready to be stored or mailed as PDF, or to be printed and charged accordingly.
. I tested several generic Android printing apps, but they all have their own drawbacks. So I’m investigating how to build a dedicated SavaPage Print App aiming to be part of