> - Printing quality is very good. However, colours are not as brilliant
>   as on screen,

Well, you're comparing glowing phosphors (additive) with light reflected
from a surface (subtractive)...

The ink levels reported by escputil aren't always immediately accurate.
Sometimes just turning the printer on consumes 2% of some colours,
sometimes turning it on costs nothing. I guess the printer forces head
cleans every so often. I have also printed full-colour pages with
(supposedly) no ink consumption, especially after turning on the
printer consumed 2%. Perhaps it also has to do with exactly when and
how often the printer samples the ink level, and/or writes it into the
cartdridge chip.

Now if cups would only do accounting for ink rather than for pages...

> - If you have a faster machine, all the processing will be quicker.

On a PIII-450 with 512M RAM the processing of a large bitmap ->
postscript -> printer binary data takes no more than a minute.
Negligible compared with the printing time. Turboprint seems to prefer
bidirectional printing except for the ultra-high quality, it's
considerably faster and I can't spot a difference in quality. Might pay
to switch gs-stp from swuni to sw (don't know anything about
gimp-print).

>   many printers. Epson is well-covered. However, Epson itself does not
>   publicly support Linux. HP does -> hp.sourceforge.net

We're talking about HP and *printer* support, right?

> - After printing several different photos, I found the following
>   settings to be good for me (on Kodak Inkjet Paper): Brightness 1.15,
>   Contrast 0.9, Magenta 0.93, Yellow 0.96 - all others unchanged.

What smart scheme can we drum up to find out systematically what colour
adjusting we should use?

> Now let's see where to get decent ink to refill, and figure out how to
> circumvent this chip-on-cartridge trick...

There used to be this brilliantly engineered ink level restore system
(ILRS) from Jettec (a UK company), which uses a little programmer to
reprogram the chip to "full" after breaking it off an empty Epson
cartridge and putting it onto a Jettec cartridge. Then Epson changed
their chips... but I managed to modify the programmer so that it can
program the new Epson chips. However Jettec discontinued the ILRS and
chipless Jettec cartridges are no longer available. Instead, Jettec
cartrdiges now come with chips, and noticably higher price tags.

http://www.consumables.co.nz/ sells the Jettec ones for about 3/4 of
the price for which I can get Epson ones.

Jettec doesn't make claims about colour fastness, so I expect it to be
less than Epson's. Also, the colour balance is ever so slightly
different. For playing around it's certainly good enough. I wouldn't
expect too many colour differences in the black ink.

> - AFPL Ghostscript 7.04 puts some object files into the wrong
>   directory. But after manually moving them to the right place,
>   it compiles all right with --with-ijs set.

Why didn't you just install the ghostscript 7.05 package for your
distribution? It's been GPL for months now.

> - I still have to configure IJS.

What's that? (Excuse ignorance)

Volker

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Volker Kuhlmann                 is possibly list0570 with the domain in header
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