Hi,

On Mon, 2009-08-17 at 22:47 -0500, Erik Lotspeich wrote:

It seems as though there are now two options to print with Gimp: the gutenprint plugin and the native printing.

The native printing does not appear to work properly either on Windows or Linux. Are there plans to improve this?

It works nicely for me and for most other users. If it doesn't work for you, then there appears to be a bug or some misconfiguration on your system. Perhaps you should try to isolate the problem and open a bug report.

Can Gutenprint be made to be a dependency?

Why should we do that? The plug-in is developed outside the GIMP tree by the Gutenprint developers and this works nicely. We wouldn't gain anything from adding a Gutenprint dependency. We had this (a long time ago) and it didn't work so well.

In my opinion, taking the CUPS functionality of the current native Gimp printing and integrating that into Gutenprint would be the best option.

There is no CUPS functionality in the current native GIMP printing. The GIMP print plug-in knows nothing about CUPS or whatever other print backend you may be using on your system. It uses the GTK+ print API which provides a nice abstraction layer on top of the platform-specific print system.

If you want CUPS support in Gutenprint, I suggest you talk to the Gutenprint developers. The Gutenprint project has its own mailing-list.

I have used Gimp nearly since its inception and I'm quite a fan. As a software engineer, my motivation is to try to help to improve Gimp to make it better. Although I am quite busy, I may be able to make some time to donate to an improvement of printing under Gimp.

Your help would be appreciated. But you did not tell us what the problem with printing is that you want to improve. If it's just that printing doesn't work for you, then I am sure that you will be able to find and fix the problem in your setup. If you want to improve the native GIMP print plug-in, then please propose those enhancements here.

Sven

Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:47:57 -0500 From: Erik Lotspeich

The native printing does not appear to work properly either on Windows or Linux. Are there plans to improve this? Can Gutenprint be made to be a dependency? Are there efforts to add CUPS support directly to Gutenprint?

As Sven said, it was decided to decouple GIMP and Gutenprint quite a while ago. I (as Gutenprint project lead) agree with that decision. It also gives us opportunities to do things that would be more difficult if we were tied to the GIMP release schedule.

(I think that the GIMP native plugin needs to support full PPD functionality -- last I looked, it only handles a small set of options from the PPD file -- but that's a problem with GNOME Print, not GIMP per se.)

In my opinion, taking the CUPS functionality of the current native Gimp printing and integrating that into Gutenprint would be the best option. This would work with any CUPS-configured printer since Gutenprint can be configured to print PostScript and CUPS provides the PPD. Once this is done, Gutenprint can be made a dependency of Gimp (as it was before with gimp-print).

To what end?

While Gutenprint can generate PostScript, that path loses functionality over the native drivers and is less efficient since there are more stages of conversion going on. Using native Gutenprint drivers, the plugin reconfigures its options appropriately depending upon other options that are set (e. g. when you set black and white mode, it removes all of the color controls). CUPS also doesn't have any notion of curve data types.

I think that what you're really asking for is for the Gutenprint-based plugin to query CUPS for the attached printers. That would be a worthwhile RFE, if you're interested in helping out.

I have used Gimp nearly since its inception and I'm quite a fan. As a software engineer, my motivation is to try to help to improve Gimp to make it better. Although I am quite busy, I may be able to make some time to donate to an improvement of printing under Gimp.

Our mailing list is gimp-print-devel@lists.sourceforge.net. You can subscribe by going to http://gutenprint.org and clicking on Mailing Lists.

I have tried all possible permutations of paper size between Gimp and the Windows driver.  Since this setup works great for all other applications (e.g. Word, IE, Firefox, etc.), I don't see how the problem could lie anywhere else than Gimp.

(The problem is in GTK+ more likely, but that GTK+ is technically separate is mostly irrelevant to end-users.)

Yes, it is well known that GTK+ printing (and thus GIMP printing) on Windows doesn't really work that well. My advice is always to use some other application to print images then instead, if GIMP isn't up to it. Opening an image file in another app and printing from there shouldn't take more than five seconds extra.

In fact, I would even recommend that, if the situation really is as bad as it seems to be, the print plug-in is made optional (and not selected by default) in the GIMP installer for Windows...

Sure, it would be nice if somebody fixed the problems. Volunteers welcome.

--tml

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 6:49 PM, Tor Lillqvist wrote:

Yes, it is well known that GTK+ printing (and thus GIMP printing) on Windows doesn't really work that well. My advice is always to use some other application to print images then instead,

And just in case, there is now an experimental build of PhotoPrint for Windows that is using Win port of Gutenprint.

http://tinyurl.com/p9ljcd

Alexandre

Hi,

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 09:15 -0500, Erik Lotspeich wrote:

One of the most common applications for Gimp is to print photos. If the Gnome print functionality is not up to this task, maybe it should not have been chosen.

Pretty please, check your terms. gnome-print is a framework that has been obsoleted a while ago and GIMP has never used it.

If there are features that you expect from the GTK+ Print API, then you are welcome to open bug reports against GTK+ and to contribute patches against GTK+. If there is functionality missing in the GIMP parts of the game, then you are free to open bug reports against GIMP and to contribute patches.

Sven

Hi,

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 09:03 -0500, Erik Lotspeich wrote:

I posted a detailed report of the issues that I was having to the gimp-user mailing list. The response from everyone was that it was common knowledge that native Gimp printing was problematic and to use Gutenprint. Not a single person disagreed with me when I concluded that the native Gimp printing was broken and unusable.

The fact is that the Gutenprint plug-in is too hard to set up and too hard to use for the majority of GIMP users. Many of our users are actually very happy that GIMP finally ships with a Print plug-in that just works. Those that expect for more fine-grained control over the output can install the Gutenprint plug-in easily and they will most likely also succeed in setting it up properly.

My wife has Gimp on Windows Vista. Windows allows printer drivers, such as the one for our HP OfficeJet 6110 to set parameters like paper size, orientation, etc. The Gimp native printing also allows these options to be set. This creates a conflict. After many dozens of wasted sheets of photo paper, I concluded that Gimp's native printing does not work on Windows (at least for my printer) at all -- no setting results in the desired output.

That is simply because there's hardly any contributions from the Windows community. There are lots of bug reports about problems with GTK+ print on Windows. But there's no active development on these issues. Still, the plug-in seems to work for a majority of users.

My printer accepts photo paper lengthwise on the right-hand side of the printer. With Gimp on Windows -- even when the printer driver and Gimp's paper size and orientation are matched -- printer prints in the center of the carriage and in landscape mode. I have tried all possible permutations of paper size between Gimp and the Windows driver. Since this setup works great for all other applications (e.g. Word, IE, Firefox, etc.), I don't see how the problem could lie anywhere else than Gimp.

It is in GTK+, not in GIMP. You are complaining to the wrong people. We are just using the portable Print API and expect things to work on all platforms. If that is not the case, then someone needs to fix the platform-specific code in the print backend in GTK+.

Additionally, on my Linux computer, I also had problems. You can see my post on gimp-user for reference (or I could re-post here). The most serious problem is that it wouldn't allow me to set the dimensions (the were stuck at 1.5in x 1.5in) at all and the dpi was stuck at 1500. Neither the dimentions or the dpi could be changed making it impossible for me to print anything but a small square in the image.

That sounds like a bug. These things certainly work for me.

Sven

Hi,

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 11:26 -0500, Erik Lotspeich wrote:

Thank you for the perspective. It seems that the printing part of Gimp is a second-class citizen that doesn't have the refinement of the rest of Gimp.

You misunderstood that. The Windows platform is the second-class citizen here. There is a serious lack of contributions from the world of Windows users and developers. Perhaps its because most developers that happen to like working on free software use a free operating system. I don't know. All I know is that there are lots of known issues with the Windows port and there are only very few people working on them.

Sven

Hi,

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 09:03 -0500, Erik Lotspeich wrote:

Not only
that, but it didn't have the "use original image size" button to auto-fit the image.

Actually the dialog is supposed to come up with the image in the original size (provided that this size does not exceed the printable area). I just checked this and found to that this feature appears to have been broken some time ago. I wonder why no-one submitted a bug report for this. Anyway, this is now fixed in both branches.

The native gimp printing doesn't have an auto-orientation feature either; this is another failure point. The auto-orientation feature is critical since different printers accept paper in different ways for portrait and landscape.

Sorry, but what is an auto-orientation feature? Could you explain that? Is this something that would have to be added to the "Image Settings" page of the Print dialog? Otherwise it may be a feature that the GTK+ folks might be interested in adding.

Sven

Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:26:55 -0500 From: Erik Lotspeich

Thank you for the perspective. It seems that the printing part of Gimp is a second-class citizen that doesn't have the refinement of the rest of Gimp.

I have always seen Gimp as a Photoshop competitor, so I'm thinking what if my mother-in-law (or any other non-expert computer user) were using Gimp. Would she be able to print? Would she use it instead of buying Photoshop? I would like that answer to be yes.

Tor Lillqvist wrote: >> I have tried all possible permutations of paper size between Gimp and the >> Windows driver. Since this setup works great for all other applications >> (e.g. Word, IE, Firefox, etc.), I don't see how the problem could lie >> anywhere else than Gimp.
>
> (The problem is in GTK+ more likely, but that GTK+ is technically > separate is mostly irrelevant to end-users.) >
> Yes, it is well known that GTK+ printing (and thus GIMP printing) on > Windows doesn't really work that well. My advice is always to use some > other application to print images then instead, if GIMP isn't up to > it. Opening an image file in another app and printing from there > shouldn't take more than five seconds extra. >
> In fact, I would even recommend that, if the situation really is as > bad as it seems to be, the print plug-in is made optional (and not > selected by default) in the GIMP installer for Windows... >
> Sure, it would be nice if somebody fixed the problems. Volunteers welcome.

What might be really nice is if PhotoPrint could be used as a print plugin for GIMP -- it supports everything in Gutenprint except curves, and the UI is much nicer in many ways than the Gutenprint plugin (which I've had to maintain over the years, and I'm not exactly much good at user interfaces).

Hi,

On Wed, 2009-08-19 at 01:32 -0500, Erik Lotspeich wrote:

It is in GTK+, not in GIMP. You are complaining to the wrong people. We are just using the portable Print API and expect things to work on all platforms. If that is not the case, then someone needs to fix the platform-specific code in the print backend in GTK+.

Yes, I guess I'm beginning to understand this fact. I am still not convinced that the GTK+ printing API is "ready for prime time". Because of Gimp's unique needs, I still can't help but think a better approach is needed for Gimp.

If GTK+ print is not ready, then our goal should be to get it there. It is after all one of the most widely used printing APIs in the free software world, it hides the platform details, is portable and it is in our software stack w/o introducing an extra dependency. And it is the printing UI that our target users (Linux users that use a GTK+ based desktop) are familiar with. That's a lot of good reasons to keep it. And so far I got the impression that it's just some minor details that are missing.

Say you want to print a 4x6 image at 300dpi (1200x1800) to 4x6 photo paper. There's basically only one way you're going to want to print that. Orientation is absolutely meaningless in that context. With the Gutenprint Gimp plug-in, I never have to worry about it. With GTK+, I always have to worry -- what do I set it to? My printer only accepts 4x6 paper one way (e.g. lengthwise) regardless of the orientation of the input image. But what if the image is a landscape image (e.g 6x4, 1800x1200)? What to do in this case? I have no idea, to be honest. I can only try one option and hope -- and waste a sheet of photo paper if I guessed wrong. I believe that this part should be made easier and more intuitive.

Oh, this works totally straight-forward with my printer. If I select Landscape paper orientation, then it will rotate the printout for me. Of course I don't have to feed it the paper in landscape orientation. I wonder if there's something that should be done differently in the way that GTK+ Print talks to your printer driver. This seems to be an issue somewhere down the way to your printer.

We could of course add a UI for changing the image orientation with regards to the paper orientation. But I am afraid that this will only make things more complex. Another setting that you would have to deal with. That means more chances to get it wrong.

Sven

Robert Krawitz wrote:

Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:26:55 -0500 From: Erik Lotspeich

Thank you for the perspective. It seems that the printing part of Gimp is a second-class citizen that doesn't have the refinement of the rest of Gimp.

I have always seen Gimp as a Photoshop competitor, so I'm thinking what if my mother-in-law (or any other non-expert computer user) were using Gimp. Would she be able to print? Would she use it instead of buying Photoshop? I would like that answer to be yes.

Tor Lillqvist wrote: >> I have tried all possible permutations of paper size between Gimp and the >> Windows driver. Since this setup works great for all other applications >> (e.g. Word, IE, Firefox, etc.), I don't see how the problem could lie >> anywhere else than Gimp.
>
> (The problem is in GTK+ more likely, but that GTK+ is technically > separate is mostly irrelevant to end-users.) >
> Yes, it is well known that GTK+ printing (and thus GIMP printing) on > Windows doesn't really work that well. My advice is always to use some > other application to print images then instead, if GIMP isn't up to > it. Opening an image file in another app and printing from there > shouldn't take more than five seconds extra. >
> In fact, I would even recommend that, if the situation really is as > bad as it seems to be, the print plug-in is made optional (and not > selected by default) in the GIMP installer for Windows... >
> Sure, it would be nice if somebody fixed the problems. Volunteers welcome.

What might be really nice is if PhotoPrint could be used as a print plugin for GIMP -- it supports everything in Gutenprint except curves, and the UI is much nicer in many ways than the Gutenprint plugin (which I've had to maintain over the years, and I'm not exactly much good at user interfaces).

Don't be too hard on yourself . I found Gutenprint interface allows a good degree of control and is pretty easy to use despite the complexity of what it offers.

It may not be a work of art , but in terms of user interaction I would say you does a very good job.

Sadly, many other projects are run people often very competent at coding but with little understanding of interface design. Equally unfortunate is the impression some of this group have that being able to code puts you at the right hand of God, from where you can look down with disdain on mere mortals who may in fact have a better grasp of human interaction design.

You seem to be one of those rare people who are able to bridge the gap between code and UI. Thanks for all your efforts on Gutenprint.

Best regards.

On Tuesday 18 August 2009 04:44:29 pm Robert Krawitz wrote:

What might be really nice is if PhotoPrint could be used as a print plugin for GIMP -- it supports everything in Gutenprint except curves, and the UI is much nicer in many ways than the Gutenprint plugin (which I've had to maintain over the years, and I'm not exactly much good at user interfaces).

This idea was talked about on this list perhaps 1 1/2 to 2 years ago but it did not go far. However I do think this idea has merit for a number of reasons.

1. PhotoPrint has color management support for the print work flow which is a feature missing from both the GutenPrint plug-in and the GTK+ UI.

2. It supports various n-up printing formats.

3. The UI is more accessible than the GutenPrint UI while supporting the vast majority of it's features. The missing curves support is a feature that is seldom used by GutenPrint users.

4. It is cross platform.

5. It supports high bit depth images and work flows.

I no longer use either the GutenPrint GIMP plug-in or the GTK+ UI in GIMP as I exclusively use PhotoPrint now. Having this directly integrated into GIMP would be a plus for me.

On the other hand the OpenPrinting folks are finishing up work on their new Common Printing Dialog (CPD) which has been worked on over the last two years by GSoC students. The CPD is available as both a Qt and a GTK+ dialog and the long term goal is to make it the ubiquitous printing dialog on open systems. The UI of the CPD was designed by usability experts and has had extensive usability testing. When used with GutenPrint drivers it should support most if not all of the same features as the GutenPrint plug-in. It also supports the new PDF print work flow which the OpenICC folks believe will eventually make system wide color managed printing possible via new color management aware CUPS *toraster filters that are under development.

The CPD is not intended to be cross platform so it will not fix the issues with Windows and I am not sure if it will be usable for OS/X users (I suspect it will be since OS/X uses CUPS and PDF based work flows). In addition, current versions of the CPD do not yet have user land color management support. The OpenPrinting folks are working with OpenICC and they know that at some point color management support will need to be added to the CPD.

Hal

Hi,

On Wed, 2009-08-19 at 11:34 -0700, Hal V. Engel wrote:

I no longer use either the GutenPrint GIMP plug-in or the GTK+ UI in GIMP as I exclusively use PhotoPrint now. Having this directly integrated into GIMP would be a plus for me.

Integrating PhotoPrint into GIMP is just a matter of a tiny plug-in that can be distributed along-side PhotoPrint.

Sven

* Sven Neumann [08-19-09 14:49]:

Integrating PhotoPrint into GIMP is just a matter of a tiny plug-in that can be distributed along-side PhotoPrint.

Is this being perused or in the planning stages?

Hi,

On Wed, 2009-08-19 at 15:00 -0400, Paka wrote:

* Sven Neumann [08-19-09 14:49]:

Integrating PhotoPrint into GIMP is just a matter of a tiny plug-in that can be distributed along-side PhotoPrint.

Is this being perused or in the planning stages?

It is certainly not something that the core GIMP developers will do. I'd expect that someone who thinks that this would be useful for him/her will write such a script/plug-in and perhaps ask the author(s) of PhotoPrint to distribute it.

Sven