Welcome to Gimp-Print 5.0 Beta 1! Please read these release notes
carefully.
Gimp-Print 5.0.0-beta1 is the first beta prerelease of Gimp-Print 5.0.
It is based on the 4.3 series that has been in development for over
two years, and includes many improvements over the very popular 4.2
series. This release is not considered to be a fully stable release
(there are still various things in flux, and it has not undergone the
extensive testing that is required to declare a release stable), but
we've been using it and we believe that it will be useful for many
purposes.
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 10.3) and Linux systems that in
many cases equal or exceed proprietary vendor-supplied drivers in
quality and functionality, and can be used for demanding printing
tasks requiring flexibility and high quality. This software package
includes the Print plug-in for the GIMP and Ghostscript and CUPS
drivers, as well as Foomatic data.
Gimp-Print currently contains over 200 drivers supporting in excess of
600 printer models.
The Print plug-in for the GIMP requires the GIMP 1.2.3 or above on the
1.2 line, or the GIMP 2.0 or 2.1. You may need to install packages
named "gimp-devel", "gtk-devel", and "glib-devel" (or similar
equivalents) on many systems. This plug-in will work with any
printing system, and offers a comprehensive user interface to control
all aspects of the printing process.
The CUPS driver requires CUPS 1.1.15 or higher. You may need to
install a package named "cups-devel" or similar on many systems.
Please the rest of the release notes for full details on installation,
as there is an important caveat. CUPS is the printing system used on
Macintosh OS X 10.2 and above, and many other systems use it. The
combination of CUPS and Gimp-Print provides a flexible, general
purpose printing system capable of producing the highest quality
output with any of the printers supported by this package. We
strongly recommend using CUPS with Gimp-Print as a general-purpose
printing solution.
The Ghostscript driver requires GNU Ghostscript 6.53 or higher, ESP
Ghostscript 7.05 or higher, or AFPL Ghostscript 7.04 or higher. It
uses the IJS package included with these versions of Ghostscript to
create a driver that may be built much more easily than traditional
Ghostscript drivers. The options for this driver are very complex,
and it is normally used with the Foomatic driver integration system.
Users of Macintosh OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and 10.3 (Panther) can use this
package, as the printing system is based on CUPS. For ease of
installation, a pre-built package with installer is normally supplied
a few days after the release of the source package. We highly
recommend that OS X users use the pre-built package rather than
attempt to build it themselves.
NOTE: This package will not work with any version of OS X 10.0 and
10.1 (such as 10.1.5), as those systems do not use CUPS as their
printing system. This is NOT going to be fixed; you must upgrade to
at least OS X 10.2 in order to use this package. The reason why is
that OS X 10.2 and above use CUPS as the basis of the printing system.
OS X 10.0 and 10.1 use a different system that would require a
separate driver, and we do not plan to write that driver.
The README file included with this package provides full instructions
on building and installing Gimp-Print.
* Major changes between Gimp-Print 5.0.0 alpha 3 and 5.0.0 beta 1:
1) We have made several changes to the color generation to yield
better results and fix problems.
The brightness and contrast controls now function quite
differently from before. With RGB or CMY input, the brightness
control now adjusts the luminance using an exponential function,
and so does not change the black and white points (RFE 619299) or
the color (hue and saturation). This yields more expected output
when printing to a page. The behavior with grayscale input is
equivalent. With CMYK and raw input, however, the brightness
control is applied on a per-channel basis. Normally these
controls will not be used with CMYK input.
In addition, the brightness and contrast controls are now applied
separately from the gamma adjustment. Furthermore, the
brightness, contrast, and saturation adjustments are made prior
to HSL adjustment, and gamma correction after that adjustment.
HSL and gamma adjustments are considered to be printer
adjustments while brightness, contrast, and saturation are
considered to be user adjustments. Consistent with this, the
gamma adjustment has been made optional.
Finally, color->black generation is now done correctly for RGB
and whitescale inputs.
2) An experimental Print plugin for the GIMP 2.0 is now provided.
This plugin is newly developed and is likely less stable than the
older plugin for the GIMP 1.2.
NOTE: This plugin will eventually be migrated to the GIMP source
tree for the GIMP 2.2 and beyond. Therefore, this plugin may be
removed from the Gimp-Print source tree in the future, or
restricted to use with the GIMP 2.0 only.
3) The GIMP plugin now saves the printc file in a form that can be
read back in any locale. Previously, the file was not always
saved in a form that could be read back in all locales (bug
955436).
4) Printer detection and command logic in the GIMP plugin has been
completely reworked as follows:
* The plugin now uses a much faster technique to discover
printers when using System V or CUPS spoolers (bug 742187).
* The plugin offers a choice of using a standard command, a
custom command, or file output when printing. The standard
command is constructed based on the output queue name, the
printing system in use, and the type of output being
generated. It specifies raw printing for any output type other
than Postscript; Postscript printing does not use the raw
option (bug 700792). The default is to use the standard
printing command.
* The plugin no longer creates a printer definition for each
queue. If there is no previous printrc file, it creates a
single printer; if there was a previous printrc file, it keeps
all previous definitions. The output queue name for each
printer is taken from the printer name if a queue of that name
exists, otherwise no queue name is used.
* The printrc file format has changed slightly, and is not back
compatible with 5.0 alpha releases. Therefore, saving the
printrc file in this release will yield a file that cannot be
read by earlier releases.
5) A compiler warning/error in the GIMP plugin was fixed (bug
964781).
6) Duplex printing is now supported on an experimental basis in the
PCL driver for the HP LaserJet 4, 5, 6 series (and other
equivalents that use the "pcl-4" driver) and HP DeskJet 900
series (and other equivalents that use the "pcl-900"
driver). These two drivers cover a large number of equivalent
printers.
There is a choice of 2 duplex settings "Long Edge" and "Short
Edge" as well as "Simplex" (which is the default). Note that
attempting to print duplex to a non-equipped printer will be
ignored by the hardware, but the job should still print.
The Duplex option is not shown by the Gimp plugin as it only
outputs one page.
The cups PPD files and the foomatic data now reflect the additional
option, but these have not been exhaustively tested.
The "pcl-4" driver has been tested on an HP 8550, an HP 4550 (both
color printers supported in monochrome), an HP 4100TN, an HP 2200dn
and a LexMark Optra T.
The "pcl-900" driver has not been tested on a real printer.
7) The page widths for the HP DesignJet 2500 and 3500 printers have
been fixed to be 36 and 54 inches respectively. Previously both
printers were specified to be 44 inches wide.
8) (bug 972014) A bug in the Postscript output driver causes the
GIMP plugin to misbehave with certain PPD files. This bug is not
related to locale. At least certain PPD files from the Epson
PIPS drivers are known to result in this problem.
9) The Olympus P400 printer now works correctly from CUPS or
Ghostscript (bug 972478).
10) The cups-genppdupdate.5.0 script now exits with a success status
if no PPD files have been updated but there are otherwise no
errors. This permits the script to run successfully if there are
no Gimp-Print printer queues defined or all Gimp-Print-based
queues are using Gimp-Print 4.2 PPD files. This could cause
upgrade scripts to fail inappropriately.
11) The stp_string_list_t data type now uses forward declaration and
pointers. This was missed in the API cleanup in 5.0.0-alpha3.
12) The API now offers piecewise curves (using linear or cubic spline
interpolation). None of the current applications can utilize
these curves properly, however. Another problem with spline
interpolation has been fixed.
13) Additional automated testing of the color code has been added,
and various bugs in the color code in certain cases have been
fixed as a result.
14) A compile error on systems lacking the "alphasort" function has
been fixed (bug 960211). This includes at least some versions of
Solaris.
15) Build problems when VPATH is used have been fixed.
Please see the change log for full information.
--
Robert Krawitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Project lead for Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net
"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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