Printing to Google Cloud Print using CUPS

calendar Oct 15, 2011 · cloud cups Gentoo Linux mac printing

I previously blogged about allowing printing to local printers via Google Cloud Print on Gentoo , and recently I have been looking at the opposite of this – printing to Google Cloud Print from Linux.

The main reason to want to print to Google Cloud Print is for future compatibility with printers within Linux – it means that any ‘Cloud Ready Printer’ can be printed to without having to install possibly closed-source, or non-existent printer drivers.

It also allows printing directly to Google Docs, so you can easily print documents from work straight into your Google Docs account, making archiving documents simple, and easily accessible.

With this in mind, I was looking for a simple CUPS driver, which would allow printing via the normal printing functionality of any application, however this didn’t seem to exist… so I decided to write a CUPS backend and driver to support it.

The github project is available here , and I have produced packages for Gentoo ( Sabayon etc ), Debian ( Ubuntu, Mint etc ) , RedHat ( Fedora, Centos, SuSe etc ) and Arch Linux, with instructions here.