Foomatic is a printing system designed to make it easier to set up common printers for use with Debian (and other operating systems). It provides the "glue" between a print spooler (like CUPS or lpr) and your actual printer, by telling your computer how to process files sent to the printer.

This package contains the printer database distributed by OpenPrinting for most common drivers. You will probably need the foomatic-db-engine package for this package to be useful.