This is the real thing...gimp-print 4.0.0! Gimp-Print 4.0.0 is a major release of the Gimp Print plugin and associated stp GhostScript driver and CUPS driver. Among the new features over the 2.0 (distributed with the Gimp 1.0) and 3.0 (distributed with some versions of the Gimp 1.1) releases are: 1) Support for many more printers, including advanced Epson Stylus printers and many Canon BubbleJets. This software now fully supports 6 color printers with variable dot sizes. 2) Greatly improved print quality. Photographs can now be printed with excellent (certainly not "perfect") color fidelity and smoothness of tone. 3) A much-enhanced GUI in the Gimp plugin, particularly for users of recent Gimp 1.1 releases. This GUI offers better placement controls, a live preview (for Gimp 1.1.21+/1.2 only), and other control improvements. 4) Included Ghostscript and CUPS drivers derived from the same source base as the Print plugin, enabling general printing of the same quality as printing from the Gimp. 5) Included support from the Foomatic project (see http://www.linuxprinting.org/foomatic.html), greatly easing the pain of configuring printers. Foomatic is a system for using free software printer drivers with common spoolers on Unix. It supports LPD, PDQ, CUPS, the VA Linux LPD, and LPRng. 6) Greatly improved performance in many common cases. While photographs rendered in the highest quality modes still require considerable computation, typical text and graphics now render much faster. There are some new special-purpose extremely fast dithering algorithms that can be used. 7) The default color and dithering settings are much more accurate than in previous releases. 8) Users of the Print plugin in the Gimp: PLEASE NOTE THAT THE printrc FILE FORMAT IN THIS RELEASE IS NOT BACKWARD COMPATIBLE WITH THE FORMAT IN 3.0 AND PREVIOUS RELEASES! The main issue here is that running the plug-in in this release will convert your printrc file to the new format, which old releases cannot read. Gimp-Print 4.0.0 contains the following fixes over Gimp-Print 4.0b3: 1) All HP LaserJet printers except for the 4L are capable of 600 DPI resolution. 2) Any residual problems with the plugin printer list containing duplicates should now be fixed. 3) Any residual problems with scaling not being set properly in PPI mode should now be fixed. 4) An extraneous dependency on the glibc version of getopt() in escputil has been removed. 5) 'make clean' is now a bit more complete. 6) Certain Epson Stylus printers (the Stylus Pro XL, Stylus Color 400, 500, and 600, and Stylus Photo, Photo 700, and Photo EX) will not print quite as close to the bottom of the paper, due to some reports of overrunning pages. This is presumably due to paper size or printers not being perfectly in spec. 7) Canon printers at 1440x720 DPI positioned the image too far to the left edge of the paper. ERRATA: 1) PostScript files (and PPD's) with embedded .setpagedevice commands to choose a media type will not function correctly. In place of MediaType, stpMediaType will allow a choice of media type. This will not be fixed in the release; it is not always possible to know what media types are valid at the time of the .setpagedevice call, which GhostScript requires. 2) The higher resolutions of the HP Deskjet 900/1220C and the HP PhotoSmart P1000/P1100 have been disabled as they do not work. Investigation into these modes (Photo-Ret III) is continuing. It is possible that these resolutions will be re-enabled in a later update to 4.0. 3) There are some known color generation problems. In particular, greens (particularly weakly saturated greens) tend to be quite weak, giving grass a somewhat tan look. This may be improved somewhat by printing in 4-color rather than 6-color mode. The errors in color are not radical, but it may be hard to get a close match for extremely critical work. If the image is radically too light and washed out (or radically too dark), please check the color settings, and try setting the defaults (1.0 for all options). 4) When using Epson 4x6 photo paper that is perforated to allow tearing off the unprintable margins it is possible to print part way into those margins. This will not be fixed in the release. You must specify the correct image positioning in the plugin. 5) Red Hat 6.1 users cannot configure the plug-in. The problem is that neither the gimp nor the gimp-devel rpm's in that release include gimptool, which is necessary for configuration to work. This will not be fixed in the release; it is not possible for us to distribute a version of gimptool that will work in all cases. This has no effect on the usability of the GhostScript or CUPS drivers. The recommended fix is to recompile the Gimp from source (either 1.0.4 or the latest 1.1/1.2 release). That will install gimptool, and you will then be able to build the plug-in. This does not affect the Ghostscript driver. 6) The Epson Stylus Color 480 and 580 printers are not supported. These printers use a somewhat different print head from all other Epson Stylus printers that requires additional work. In addition, these printers require a special command sequence to change the ink cartridge (there are no front panel buttons to change the cartridge), and that sequence is unavailable to us. We do not anticipate supporting these printers. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/ Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@xxxxxxxxxxxx Project lead for The Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton
