Gimp-Print 4.3.22, released November 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. 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. We strongly recommend using CUPS with Gimp-Print as a general-purpose printing solution. We do not currently recommend using Foomatic, as the Foomatic data generator included with Gimp-Print offers very limited capabilities. This will be fixed in a future release. 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. 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 4.3.22 contains the following major changes over Gimp-Print 4.3.21: 1) This release offers further improvements in quality for most Epson printers. All printers have been retuned, with particular improvements in the transitions between light and dark inks and between composite CMY and black. In addition, green and blue hues have been improved significantly, and consistency across papers and between printers has been improved. 2) There have likely been some improvements in quality for other color inkjet printers (Canon, Lexmark, and HP) due to the parameters for Epson printers being copied into these drivers, but this is currently untested. 3) Even Tone dithering has been improved somewhat. The transition between different drop sizes is now computed with the Even Tone algorithm, yielding better quality, and the error diffusion in this algorithm has also been improved, yielding better smoothness. 4) The parameters for the Epson Stylus C43 and C44 printers have been corrected, so these printers now print correctly. 5) Startup time (both for Gimp-Print programs as a whole and for individual pages) has been improved somewhat due to the XML files describing various components being loaded only when necessary. Some of the XML files are quite large, and loading them at startup is fairly time consuming (on the order of a second typically). In addition, this will reduce problems in the future due to dependencies between the XML files now being resolved explicitly. 6) The Sony UP-DP10 lamination feature has been fixed. 7) Borderless capability for Olympus and Sony printers has been added. 8) Additional paper sizes for Olympus and Sony printers have been added. 9) A bug in the CUPS driver whereby a thin black line was sometimes printed at the very top of the page has been fixed. 10) The CUPS PPD files are not built if the CUPS driver is not built, unless --with-cups-ppds is supplied (previously --without-cups did not disable building the PPD files). 11) The test pattern generator has been substantially rewritten, with many syntactic and functional improvements. In particular, it can now generate 8 and 16 bit inputs in both RGB and CMYK, and it is no longer limited to 7 channels. It can also accept multiple input patterns in one file. 12) The Fujifilm CX-400 is now supported. 13) The Epson Stylus CX-6300, CX-6400, CX-8300, and CX-8400 are now supported. 14) The color code has been partially rewritten, and now permits 16-bit RGB and grayscale inputs in addition to the CMYK inputs. The 16-bit RGB and gray/whitescale inputs are corrected by the driver, unlike the 16-bit CMYK input, which is raw. 15) The Epson Stylus Color 440, 640, 660, and 670 now position the paper correctly horizontally. 16) The head configurations for the Epson Stylus Color 400, 500, 600, 800, and 1520 have been adjusted. 17) The paper positioning controls in the GIMP plugin have been rearranged slightly for better consistency. 18) The GIMP plugin now allows aligning an image to a fixed grid, with grid lines spaced according to the percentage of page size. To move the image along this grid, use control-middle button. 19) Microweave is now a separate control for Epson Stylus printers that support it. This simplifies the resolution lists for some printers, particularly the Stylus Pro printers. 20) The compiler options for gcc have been changed to permit inlining larger procedures. This improves dither performance somewhat. 21) Horizontal image positioning on the Epson Stylus 640 and similar printers has been fixed (bug 819581). 22) All remaining vestiges of gimpprint-config have been removed.
