-*- Mode: Text -*- Gimp-Print 4.2.0, released November 24, 2001, is the latest stable release of this package. This release offers numerous improvements over the previous stable release, 4.0 This software includes the Print plug-in for the Gimp, and GhostScript and CUPS drivers, including Foomatic data. The Gimp Print plugin requires the Gimp 1.2. The CUPS driver requires CUPS 1.1.9 or higher (1.1.12 or above is highly recommended). The Ghostscript driver requires Ghostscript 5.10, 5.50, 6.51, or any later GNU Ghostscript release based on 6.51 (e. g. 6.52). Please read the README file for full instructions on building and installing this package. Gimp-Print 4.2 contains the following major changes over Gimp-Print 4.0: * Major Bugs Fixed from 4.0: 1) A problem with fine black data printing incorrectly in 4.0 has been fixed. 2) Very small images print correctly in the Gimp plugin. 3) A number of minor bugs in scaling and positioning in the Gimp plugin are fixed. 4) Printing pure black and white (monochrome) to black and white printers now works properly, rather than silently being converted to grayscale. 5) The package prints correctly in grayscale when the source resolution is higher than the output resolution. * General User-Visible Changes: 1) Many additional printers are supported, including several Lexmark printers for the first time. The list of supported printers is at the bottom of this release memo. 2) Default printing resolutions are 300x300 or 360x360 DPI for all printers, rather than the lowest available resolution. On Epson printers, the default 360x360 printing modes are in most cases higher quality than the default 360x360 mode in 4.0. 3) The same defaults for all driver and printer characteristics apply to all front ends (the Gimp plugin, the CUPS driver, and the Ghostscript driver). 4) A user's manual (for the CUPS driver and GIMP plugin) is now supplied with the package. 5) A developer's manual is now supplied with the package. This describes how to use the library interface, how to tune printers, and other topics. 6) The package is now internationalized. Full translations are available for Swedish and British English; partial translations are currently available for French, Norwegian, Danish, and Polish. * Quality Improvements: 1) Color accuracy in Photograph and Solid Colors mode is greatly improved over 4.0. This is most noticeable on red, green, blue, and violet colors. Generally, prints should need little if any tuning. 2) Printed images are much smoother (more even) in texture. This is particularly true on 6-color (photo) and variable drop size printers. The transition between light and dark inks in 6-color printers should be invisible to the unaided eye at all but the lowest resolutions. 3) In color mode, fine black detail prints much more accurately than previously. Previously, fine black detail typically did not print solidly; this was particularly noticeable when printing groups of lines at high resolution. 4) Epson printers support a greater range of resolutions and quality settings, from very low resolution draft mode up to 2880x1440 for the newest Epson printers. This offers a full range of speed/quality tradeoffs for any printing application. The emulated resolutions in 4.0 have been dropped, as they do not yield any improvement in quality under any circumstances that we have identified. 5) Epson printers produce much better quality on plain paper than previously. 6) All of the dithering algorithms, except for Hybrid Floyd-Steinberg (which is not recommended for most purposes) have been improved. Ordered dithering is now on a par with Adaptive Hybrid dithering for most image types other than line art, and Fast and Very Fast are viable choices for test prints on even high quality printers. The Adaptive Random and Random Floyd-Steinberg algorithms have been dropped, as they offer no advantage over the faster Adaptive Hybrid and Hybrid Floyd-Steinberg algorithms. 7) PCL printers will print typical sparse text pages much more efficiently. 8) The package as a whole will use significantly less memory, particularly when printing at high resolutions. * Changes to the Gimp Print plugin: 1) The plugin now provides tooltips for all controls (a much-requested feature!). 2) The plugin now provides many new options for positioning the image on the page. These options are described in the tooltip help for the preview window. 3) The GUI has been considerably rearranged, and we hope it is more logical. 4) Printing in black and white is now accomplished in the Output Type radio button group rather than the Image Type group. 5) It is now possible to define a logical printer queue (essentially a group of settings saved under a name). 6) The preview window is much more responsive than before. The preview both moves more quickly and does not flash to as great a degree as before. 7) The plugin will no longer allow settings that are inappropriate for the current printer or output mode. * Changes to the CUPS Driver: 1) The CUPS driver now offers color adjustment choices (currently in the form of choice menus). 2) The CUPS driver now supports printing CMYK output, as well as RGB, grayscale, and black and white. 3) The CUPS driver no longer allows attempts to print in color to black and white printers. 4) The CUPS PPD files are now translated into several languages (currently British English, Swedish, French, Norwegian, Polish, and Danish). 5) The CUPS driver will now terminate a job cleanly if the job is removed from the queue while it was printing. The existing data will be flushed to the printer, following which the driver will cleanly terminate the print job. Previously, the printer was left in an indeterminate state. 6) The CUPS driver will build correctly on BSD-based systems. This requires CUPS 1.1.11 or above. * Changes to the Ghostscript Driver: 1) A new, simplified build procedure is provided for use with Ghostscript 5.50 and 6.51. This requires copying only one file into the Ghostscript source directory, and links dynamically against the driver library. This permits upgrades to the 4.2 driver library (e. g. to support new printers) without recompiling Ghostscript. The old method is still available, but we recommend using the new procedure. 2) Printing black and white only images is now accomplished with -dColor=2 rather than -dImageType=3. * Miscellaneous changes: 1) Escputil (a utility for managing Epson printers) is more robust than in 4.0, and uses the readline package where available for better interaction. 2) Roll feed printing is supported for Epson printers with the capability, such as the Stylus Photo 870. 3) The package supports custom page sizes for printers allowing this. It also imposes minimum paper size limits for printers that require a minimum paper size. 4) The Debian package build procedure is now compliant with Standards-Version 3.5.6.0 and is lintian-clean. It will build on `woody' and later distributions. 5) The compilation phase of the build emits more warnings than under 4.0, particularly in the Gimp plugin. These extra warnings are due to greater compiler checking of the code. * Incompatibilities between 4.0 and 4.2: 1) The options for the Ghostscript driver have changed incompatibly between 4.0 and 4.2. Please read src/ghost/README for more information. 2) The PPD files for the 4.2 CUPS driver are incompatible with the 4.0 driver, and vice versa. You must reinstall all of your print queues to use the new driver. 3) The Foomatic data in the 4.2 distribution is generated during the build of the package, rather than being distributed statically. It requires the latest version of the Foomatic driver, and is incompatible with the Foomatic data in 4.0. The 4.2 driver is named "Gimp-print" in Foomatic, as opposed to "stp" in 4.0. 4) Printing pure black and white (not grayscale) images is different. The exact procedure is described in the release notes for each front end. * Known Limitations: 1) The CUPS PPD files are not translated on all systems. BSD systems in particular are known to fail to translate these files. This is discussed in detail in the README. 2) The Epson Stylus C40UX (and very likely other printers in the C20 and C40 lines) do not identify themselves. Therefore, escputil -u -d will not return anything useful, and when performing print head alignment, the printer model must be specified, as autodetection will not work. 3) The "align color" (-o) command to escputil does not currently work on the printers that should support it (Epson Stylus Color 480 and 580, and C20SX, C20UX, C40SX, and C40UX). We do not know if this is a bug in the software or a limitation of the printers. 4) Changing ink cartridges on the Epson Stylus Color 480/580 is not supported. 5) The drivers for the Epson Stylus Pro printers (5000, 5500, 7000, 7500, 9000, 9500, and 10000) are only partially tested and tuned. They are known not to work correctly in many modes. 6) The Epson Stylus Photo 2000P is not properly tuned and likely produces lower output quality than other Epson printers. 7) The Canon BJC-8200 and S800 do not produce optimum quality. 8) Many Epson printers (including the Stylus Photo 870/875, 1270, 780/785/895, 890, 1280/1290, and 810/820) do not produce optimum quality on Premium Glossy Photo Paper. In particular, color quality may not be at quite as high a standard as it is on the older Photo Paper. The difference is subtle; for most purposes the output quality will be superb. Tuning the color output may or may not improve the quality. 9) The Postscript driver (ps and ps2) does not generate multi-page output correctly. This should not be a major problem, as there is little reason to use it outside of the GIMP. There are no plans at present to fix this bug. * Internal changes: 1) The interface between the core drivers and the front ends has been completely reimplemented. There is now a core driver library (libgimpprint) with the front ends linking against it. The interface has been redesigned to some degree, allowing for better separation between driver and front-end concerns. The package takes full advantage of the autoconf machinery. Other front ends may be written against the driver; a test pattern generator is provided in src/testpattern that can be used to generate test patterns, or used as the basis for other applications. A gimpprint-config script, similar to gtk-config and gimp-config, is provided. 2) The core driver package now operates in CMY space rather than RGB space. The change has very little immediate effect, but it will enable significant improvements in future releases. 3) Two new input modes (8 and 16 bit CMYK) are provided. The 8-bit CMYK interface is gamma and density corrected; the 16 bit CMYK is a raw input, with no correction performed. This is useful for applications desiring the greatest possible control over the output while taking advantage of the dithering and device driving capabilities of the package. 4) The "unprint" program supplied in the test directory is much more functional and accurate than previously. Supported Printers: Many variations on these printers are also supported. Generally, the Epson printers are fully supported, although not fully tuned in all cases; the Canon, HP, and Lexmark printers vary. Many printers previously supported have greatly improved support. PostScript level 1 PostScript level 2 CANON BJC 30 (NEW) CANON BJC 50 (NEW) CANON BJC 55 (NEW) CANON BJC 80 (NEW) CANON BJC 85 (NEW) CANON BJC 210 (NEW) CANON BJC 240 (NEW) CANON BJC 250 (NEW) CANON BJC 1000 CANON BJC 2000 CANON BJC 3000 CANON BJC 4300 CANON BJC 4400 photo CANON BJC 6000 CANON BJC 6100 CANON BJC 7000 CANON BJC 7100 CANON BJC 8200 CANON S400 (NEW) CANON S450 (NEW) CANON S800 (NEW) CANON S4500 (NEW) EPSON Stylus C20SX (NEW) EPSON Stylus C20UX (NEW) EPSON Stylus C40SX (NEW) EPSON Stylus C40UX (NEW) EPSON Stylus C60 (NEW) EPSON Stylus C70 (NEW) EPSON Stylus C80 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Color EPSON Stylus Color Pro EPSON Stylus Color Pro XL EPSON Stylus Color 400 EPSON Stylus Color 440 EPSON Stylus Color 460 EPSON Stylus Color 480 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Color 500 EPSON Stylus Color 580 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Color 600 EPSON Stylus Color 640 EPSON Stylus Color 660 EPSON Stylus Color 670 EPSON Stylus Color 680/777 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Color 740 EPSON Stylus Color 760 EPSON Stylus Color 800 EPSON Stylus Color 850 EPSON Stylus Color 860 EPSON Stylus Color 880 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Color 83 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Color 900 EPSON Stylus Color 980 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Color 1160 EPSON Stylus Color 1500 EPSON Stylus Color 1520 EPSON Stylus Color 3000 EPSON Stylus Photo EPSON Stylus Photo 700 EPSON Stylus Photo EX EPSON Stylus Photo 720 EPSON Stylus Photo 750 EPSON Stylus Photo 780/785/790 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Photo 810/820 (NEW, not verified, expected to work) EPSON Stylus Photo 870/875 EPSON Stylus Photo 890/895 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Photo 1200 EPSON Stylus Photo 1270 EPSON Stylus Photo 1280/1290 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Photo 2000P EPSON Stylus Pro 5000 (NEW, partially functional) EPSON Stylus Pro 5500 (NEW, partially functional) EPSON Stylus Pro 7000 (NEW, partially functional) EPSON Stylus Pro 7500 (NEW, partially functional) EPSON Stylus Pro 9000 (NEW, partially functional) EPSON Stylus Pro 9500 (NEW, partially functional) EPSON Stylus Pro 10000 (NEW, partially functional) EPSON Stylus Scan 2000 (NEW) EPSON Stylus Scan 2500 (NEW) HP DeskJet 340 HP DeskJet 400 HP DeskJet 500 HP DeskJet 500C HP DeskJet 520 HP DeskJet 540C HP DeskJet 550C HP DeskJet 560C HP DeskJet 600/600C (Single Cartridge) HP DeskJet 600 series (2 Cartridge) HP DeskJet 690 series (Photo-Ink capable) HP DesignJet 750 (NEW) HP DeskJet 810C HP DeskJet 812C HP DeskJet 840C HP DeskJet 842C HP DeskJet 845C HP DeskJet 850C HP DeskJet 855C HP DeskJet 870C HP DeskJet 890C HP DeskJet 895C HP DeskJet 900 series HP PhotoSmart P1000 HP DeskJet 1100C HP PhotoSmart P1100 HP DeskJet 1120C HP DeskJet 1200C HP DeskJet 1220C HP DeskJet 1600C HP DeskJet 2000 series HP DeskJet 2500 series HP LaserJet II series HP LaserJet III series HP LaserJet 4 series HP LaserJet 4V, 4Si HP LaserJet 5 series HP LaserJet 5Si HP LaserJet 6 series Lexmark 4076 Lexmark Z42 (NEW) Lexmark Z43 (NEW) Lexmark Z52 (NEW)