Gimp-Print 4.3.15, released June 1, 2003, is a development release of this package. Like all development releases, this version is considered unstable and should only be used by those individuals tolerant of the likelihood of problems. Individuals desiring a stable release of Gimp-Print should use the latest 4.2 release. Gimp-Print is a suite of printer drivers that may be used with most common UNIX print spooling systems, including CUPS, lpr, LPRng, or others. These drivers provide high quality printing for UNIX (including Macintosh OS X 10.2 and newer) and Linux systems in many cases equal to or better than proprietary vendor-supplied drivers, and can be used for many of the most demanding printing tasks. This software includes the Print plug-in for the Gimp, and Ghostscript and CUPS drivers, including Foomatic data. This package requires libxml2 2.5 or above. You may need to install a package named "libxml2-devel" or the like on many distributions. The Print plugin for the Gimp requires the Gimp 1.2 (later versions of the Gimp are not supported). You may need to install a package named "gimp-devel" or the like on many distributions. The CUPS driver requires CUPS 1.1.15 or higher. You may need to install a package named "cups-devel" or the like on many distributions. The Foomatic data will work with either Foomatic 2.x or 3.x. Foomatic 3.x has additional capabilities that this package detects and takes advantage of. The IJS-based GhostScript plugin driver requires GNU Ghostscript 6.53 or later, ESP Ghostscript 7.05 or later, or APFL GhostScript 7.04 or later. It also requires that glib 1.2 be installed. You may need to install a package named "glib-devel" or the like on many distributions. Users of Macintosh OS X 10.2 and above can use this package, as the printing system is based on CUPS, which is supported by Gimp-print. Note that Macintosh OS X 10.0 and 10.1 (including 10.1.5) cannot use this package. Please read the README file for full instructions on installing this package. Gimp-Print 4.3.15 contains the following major changes over Gimp-Print 4.3.14: 1) The code for handling ink shades and drop sizes has been extensively overhauled; results should be much more consistent. In particular, the same balance between ink shades is now used at all resolutions for a given printer, and the driver always tries to use the smallest ink drop size it usefully can. The result is that colors should be much more uniform across different resolutions with the same printer (particularly with variable drop size printers), and output should be smoother. It is likely (although this has not been verified) that printing is faster, too. There may still be some issues; please report any problems. Internally, this is implemented by means of a new "channel" architecture, which is responsible for conversions of this type. 2) A long-standing build problem whereby the package will not build on systems that already have Gimp-Print 4.2 or earlier versions of Gimp-Print 4.3 installed has been fixed. 3) The existing Line Art image optimization has been renamed to Uncorrected, which is a better description of its effect. There is a new Threshold mode, which simply computes a threshold value (either on or off for each color). 4) The default image optimization mode is now Photographs (which has the best color correction) rather than the old Line Art (which as noted above is now called Uncorrected). 5) An experimental driver for the Olympus P-300 has been added. This driver has significant limitations; the size of an image much closely match the size of a print from this printer. 6) The Fast and Very Fast dither algorithms are significantly different from before. The Fast dither algorithm now uses the same dither pattern previously used by the Very Fast algorithm, and the Very Fast algorithm only uses the largest drop size. The Ordered algorithm should now run as fast as the Fast algorithm did before. 7) This package now uses gettext 0.11 internally.
