# Final word from the Author

## Who am I, what is my business?

My employer is Danka Deutschland GmbH, a leading and manufacturer-independent provider of professional and hi-speed digital printing systems, black-and-white as well as colour. Danka provides hardware, software, service, maintenance, consumables and customised solutions for the products in its portfolio. I work there as a System Engineer. Amongst the brands Danka offers are Heidelberg (formerly Kodak), Canon, &Hewlett-Packard;, Hitachi, Infotec and EfI.

My acquaintance with &Linux; and the Free Software community is not too old. When I started to play around with &Linux; at the beginning of 1999, my deepest disappointment was the poor support for printing. True, I made all our machines spit out simplex prints -- but what about duplex? What about punching the output? How to make sorting work? Or stapling, cover sheets and all the other beautiful finishing options our engines offer to customers? No way -- at least for me as a non-geek!

I began a search on the Internet for a solution. Fortunately not much later, in May 1999, Mike Sweet, principal developer of &CUPS;, announced the first Beta release of this superb piece of printing software. After trying it briefly, I knew this was it!

Next thing I attempted: to make &Linux; distributions interested in this new stuff. Believe me -- it was more than tenacious! They seemed to think they already had the best thing they could get in printing. One reason probably was that they (and many &Linux; developers) never had to think about how to best support a printer duplexer -- because one had never come near their own desks...

Finally, my attempts to make some &Linux; print publications interested in &CUPS; backfired on me - one editor squeezed me into writing a series on the subject myself. And this is how some people started to give me the nickname CUPS Evangelist. I will not get rid of this nick anytime soon, now that even the &kde; people wedged me into their timeframe of releases. Oh, boy...

Anyway, &CUPS; is now making its way around the world and it might well become a triumphal one: I am a little bit proud to have supported and contributed to this from near the beginning.

It should encourage you: even if some more experienced &Linux; users than you are skeptical about it, and even if your programming skills are next to zero (like mine) - there are a lot of tasks and jobs and ideas, and talent that you can contribute to the Free Software community. Not least within the &kde; project...

## Credits

I'd like to thank...

- Mike Sweet for developing &CUPS; in the first place

- Jean-Eric Cuendet for starting kups and qtcups, the predecessors of &kdeprint;

- Michael Goffioul for doing all the hard work recently

- Martin Konold for thinking twice

- Sven Guckes for teaching me a few things about the art of survival on the terminal (just in case &kde; is not there ;-) )

- ...too numerous others to mention who also let me snatch bits and bytes of knowledge off them

- and last, but not least: Tom Schwaller for encouraging me to get into documentation writing

## Caveats

&kdeprint; has been developed on a system using &CUPS; 1.1.6. &kdeprint; has been tested on other versions of &CUPS; and so far no incompatibilities are known. By the time of writing this Handbook, &CUPS; 1.1.9 is out with a few new features not yet supported by &kdeprint;. Of course you are able to access these features, but you will need to bypass &kdeprint; and use the &CUPS; command-line tools or edit configuration files manually. &kdeprint;'s development will go on and this Handbook strives to always be the best available user documentation resource for it.