Welcome to Gutenprint 5.0.0-rc1! Please read these release notes
carefully.
Gutenprint, formerly named 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, 10.3, and
10.4) 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.
The package has been renamed in order to clearly distinguish it from
the GIMP. While this package started out as the Print plugin for the
GIMP, it has expanded into a collection of general purpose printer
drivers, and the Print plugin for the GIMP is now only a small (but
important) piece of the package. Furthermore, the name Gutenprint
recognizes Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable type
printing press. Finally, the word "guten" means "good" in German.
Gutenprint 5.0.0-rc1 is the first release candidate of Gutenprint 5.0.
It is based on the Gimp-Print 4.3 series that has been in development
for over three years, and includes many improvements over the very
popular 4.2 series. This release is believed to be quite stable, but
further testing is required before final release. We believe this
release to be stable enough for day to day use, and encourage people
to test it and report their results.
Gutenprint 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 (1.2.5 is recommended), or the GIMP 2.0 or above. 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, in particular the Exceptions and
Workarounds, 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 Gutenprint 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 Gutenprint 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), 10.3 (Panther), and 10.4
(Tiger) 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 Gutenprint.
* Major changes between Gutenprint 5.0.0 beta 4 and Gutenprint 5.0.0
release candidate 1:
1) Color correction is greatly improved, particularly for Epson
printers. The following general and specific improvements have
been made:
* The default gamma for all Epson printers has been increased to
resolve long-standing issues with overly dark prints. The user
gamma adjustment is specified as a correction, so the default
value of 1.0 will yield correct results.
* Luminosity (darkness) correction has been simplified and
improved by performing correction only on the color component,
without adjusting the gray component. This improves dark cyans
and greens in particular, and generally yields smoother tonal
changes.
* Red and blue generation for the Epson Stylus R800 and R1800
(and for any future printers) has been completely revamped. It
is now done by using per-channel curves. This improves control
over the output and allows ink combinations that could not be
generated with the previous code. The most notable effect is
improved magenta.
* Greens have been improved on all Epson printers and are now
considerably more saturated and less yellow.
* Black generation has been improved on all printers,
particularly Epson printers using Ultrachrome (R) inks.
* Photo (light cyan and light magenta) ink generation has been
improved on many Epson printers.
* Composite gray generation is now done by adding in CMY inks
rather than subtracting out the gray component. This separates
the gray balance from the per-channel ink density, permitting
much better color saturation for certain printers with
unbalanced inks. In particular, the Epson R-series printers
can now generate much better orange, yellow, and green without
sacrificing neutrality of grayscale.
* The operation of the Bright Colors color correction mode has
been changed, and is now much closer to the operation of High
Accuracy. The main difference is that highly saturated colors
now clip rather than taper off toward full saturation. This
will yield improved color brilliance with some loss of detail
in certain cases (particularly bright greens).
* A new Correct Hue Only mode has been added that corrects ink
hue without adjusting darkness. This permits achieving greater
color saturation without losing hue accuracy, although many
colors will be too dark in this mode.
2) PrintoutMode has been fixed in the Foomatic data generator so
that it now generates correct options in all cases.
3) CUPS PPD files are now built with translations enabled. If you
do not want translated PPD files, configure the package with
./configure --disable-translated-cups-ppds
4) The Canon SELPHY CP-600 dye sublimation printer has been added.
5) Preliminary support for the Canon Pixma i4000 printer has been
added. The Canon BubbleJet and Pixma driver is likely to undergo
considerable revision and may not be fully stabilized at release.
6) The Epson Stylus C82, C84, and C86 now use black ink with glossy
paper. The ink in these printers has been reformulated and is
now compatible with glossy paper.
7) The Epson Stylus CX3650 now prints correctly (previously there
were minor vertical offset problems, yielding slightly blurry
prints).
8) The Ghostscript driver (ijsgutenprint) now generates correct
output (previously it generated output that was much too dark
unless the gamma setting was enabled explicitly).
9) New printing resolutions have been added for certain Epson
printers:
* 720 DPI high quality has been added for all but the very oldest
Epson printers, and 1440x720 DPI highest quality has been added
for all Epson printers with an upper resolution limit of
2880x720 DPI. We have received reports that 1440x720 highest
quality, which was present in Gimp-Print 4.2, often produces
better output than 2880x720 while requiring less computation.
* 2880x2880 DPI resolution has been added for the Epson Stylus
C86 and similar printers, such as the CX6600. While this is
not likely to yield a great improvement over 2880x1440 DPI,
this may yield some improvement for certain kinds of line art
with very fine detail. In general, there is little advantage
to be had from any resolution above 1440x1440 DPI with this
printer.
* 5760x2880 DPI has been added for the Epson Stylus Photo R800
and R1800. Tests indicate that this resolution does offer a
small degree of improvement over 2880x2880; the most noticeable
improvement is smoother tonality. This enhancement may be
desirable for particularly critical printing.
10) The Epson Stylus RX425 is now explicitly supported.
11) Some problems with PPD file generation using cups-genppdconfig
have been fixed. In particular, PPD permission and ownership
checks have been relaxed to permit operation on more systems.
12) A problem that could on rare occasions cause blank areas on photo
printers has been fixed. The problem was more likely to be
observed when printing in 16-bit mode.
13) Debian packaging has been removed from this release. Debian
packaging will be handled by the maintainer outside of the
release.
14) On systems supporting shared library versioning, the shared
library is labeled with the correct release version rather than a
development version.
15) It is now possible to specify variable drop sizes with
predithered mode. Values of 0, 1, 2, or 3 will cause the
appropriate drop size to be printed. Previously only the
smallest or largest drop size could be printed with this dither
mode.
16) Traditional Chinese (zh_TW) translation has been added.
17) A problem whereby attempting to use certain paper types with
certain Epson printers would cause a failure is fixed.
18) A problem whereby the image height and width were not properly
preserved across uses of the GIMP plugin is fixed.
19) In the Foomatic data the options "STP_InputSlot" and
"STP_MediaType" were renamed to "InputSlot" and "MediaType". This
way the names are Adobe-compliant and so PPD-aware applications
understand for what they are used for and treat them
appropriately (for example appear on first page of printer
options dialog of kprinter and XPP).
--
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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