This file describes the filters for the EPSON Stylus Color family of printers. They are all initially based on `epsonlqc-filter.x'. Most of this is completely untested since I (Dirk Ritter ) only have the original Stylus Color, so there is no warranty for anything whatsoever! Choosing the right printer model -------------------------------- These days there are a whole lot of EPSON Stylus Color printers out there: +----------------------------------------------------+ | Stylus Color | Filter name(s) | +====================================================+ |original + 'PRO' | StylusColor@360dpi-filter | | | StylusColor@720dpi-filter | +----------------------------------------------------+ | II | StylusColor-II-IIs@360dpi-filter | | | StylusColor-II@720dpi-filter | +----------------------------------------------------+ | 1500 |*StylusColor-II-IIs@360dpi-filter | | |*StylusColor-II@720dpi-filter | +----------------------------------------------------+ | IIs | StylusColor-II-IIs@360dpi-filter | | | StylusColor-IIs@720dpi-filter | +----------------------------------------------------+ | 500 | StylusColor-500@360dpi-filter | | | StylusColor-500@720dpi-filter | +----------------------------------------------------+ | | StylusColor-600@360dpi-filter | | 600 | StylusColor-600@720dpi-filter | | | StylusColor-600@1440dpi-filter | +----------------------------------------------------+ | | StylusColor-800@360dpi-filter | | 800 | StylusColor-800@720dpi-filter | | | StylusColor-800@1440dpi-filter | +----------------------------------------------------+ | |*StylusColor-800@360dpi-filter | | 1520 |*StylusColor-800@720dpi-filter | | | StylusColor-1520@1440dpi-filter | +----------------------------------------------------+ * Filters marked with a star in front of them may or may not be applicable, so please do not try them out carelessly. At least - please do not complain too loud about a wrecked printer if you do. You may wonder if it is worth trying the original model or the 'II' model if you have a Stylus Color 400. The short answer is 'no'. There is no support for hardware that uses proprietary interfaces among developers of free software and there would be no interest to support hardware that is as expensive - after all - you got a printer that has next to no internal data processing abilities but you paid nearly as much as you would have paid for a 'smart' printer who does have this important feature. Enough said. Buy a real printer. If you have a Stylus Color Photo series printer you may be aware of the fact that it uses more colors. This does not (yet) seem to be supported by Gunther Hess's driver `uniprint' so you are out of luck. However, you may still hope for support to emerge in later versions of `uniprint' since the printers seem to support ESC/P2. If you have some other new model that supports ESC/P2 you may try the simple filter `StylusColor-generic-filter'. It supports color with 360 dpi but offers no thrills. You may at your own risk try to choose an older model that has similar capabilities, but please consult your printer documentation and the documentation that ships with GhostScript first - especially `Devices.htm' is heartily recommended for reading. Last but not least - `magicfilterconfig' as shipped with Debian let's you choose the printer and it is recommended that you install all filters that match your printer. Just give different names to them such as `360', `720' and `1440', but always choose the same device, eg. `/dev/lp0'. You would then issue the command `lpr -P 1440 Letter.ps' if you wanted to print out some important letter on ink jet paper with special coating and `lpr -P 360 shopping_list.ps' if you just wanted to get your shopping list on some piece of cheap recycling paper. Tweaking GhostScript for fun and profit --------------------------------------- Originally I tried to keep track of ever changing GhostScript driver options. If you have the first Stylus Color printer, a Stylus Color Pro, or a Stylus Color 500 then you may still prefer the good old `stcolor' driver. However, as Gunther Hess ditched the thing in favor of his `uniprint' driver I use that as well. Since I expect further option changes I also took the chance and did weasel out of the option tweaking business. Surely one could just pass any options to GhostScript like before, but I consider the `*.upp'-files to be a good thing just because further changes of options may not break the filters I cooked. So - feel free to either tweak the filters or tweak your Unified Printer Parameter files, but do not try tweaking both at once. Support for the Portable Document Format is included, but you will need a recent Aladdin GhostScript version in order to actually get this right. For the time beeing I would just recommend against it. Tweaking Magicfilter for fun and profit --------------------------------------- There is not much you can do here since it already offers ultimate flexibility. However, if you want new conversion rules like some standard character set conversion with recode for normal text you definitely should go to the trouble and do it properly. Hard-coded paths are surely out of question - edit the file `./configure.in' instead, run autoconf and make conditional use of the variables configure spits out. (Besides - don't forget to update the file `./filters/filters2.h.in' by running `./filters/mkfilterhin' - otherwise the newly introduced variables simply would not find their way into the build environment.) Character set conversion ------------------------ The Debian folks introduced the feature to preprocess regular text with GNU recode in order to get extended characters right. Currently this leads to the expectation that you feed Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) encoded text to a printer configured for an IBM code-page 437 (IBM-PC). You can easily tweak this to your little heart's content if you change recode's options at the bottom of the filters or in the middle of the source files. Thank you for listening. /bye Dirk