Gimp-Print 4.3.17, released June 20, 2003, is a development release of this package. Like all development releases, this version is considered unstable and should only be used by those individuals tolerant of the likelihood of problems. Individuals desiring a stable release of Gimp-Print should use the latest 4.2 release.

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 newer) and Linux systems in many cases equal to or better than proprietary vendor-supplied drivers, and can be used for many of the most demanding printing tasks.

This software includes the Print plug-in for the Gimp, and Ghostscript and CUPS drivers, including Foomatic data.

The Print plugin for the Gimp requires the Gimp 1.2 (later versions of the Gimp are not supported). You may need to install a package named "gimp-devel" or the like on many distributions.

The CUPS driver requires CUPS 1.1.15 or higher. You may need to install a package named "cups-devel" or the like on many distributions.

The Foomatic data will work with either Foomatic 2.x or 3.x. Foomatic 3.x has additional capabilities that this package detects and takes advantage of.

The IJS-based GhostScript plugin driver requires GNU Ghostscript 6.53 or later, ESP Ghostscript 7.05 or later, or APFL GhostScript 7.04 or later.

Users of Macintosh OS X 10.2 and above can use this package, as the printing system is based on CUPS, which is supported by Gimp-print. Note that Macintosh OS X 10.0 and 10.1 (including 10.1.5) cannot use this package.

Please read the README file for full instructions on installing this package.

Gimp-Print 4.3.17 contains the following major changes over Gimp-Print 4.3.16:

1) The libxml2 package is no longer required for building Gimp-Print. It has been replaced with a very light weight XML package called mxml, which is compiled into the library.

2) The glib package is no longer required for building the GhostScript IJS driver (ijsgimpprint).

3) The libgimpprintui library is now correctly built or not depending upon whether --enable-libgimpprintui is passed or not.

4) White output is now truly white. In 4.3.16, a very small number of dots was printed even for white output, which in some cases made printing take much longer than required.

5) Roll feed should now work correctly on Epson printers that do not have a paper cutter.

6) Default values for dither algorithm and image optimization have been added; this allows the user to not specify these options.

7) A new Quality setting has been added for the Epson driver. This enables the user to choose from a set of named qualities (e. g. economy, draft, standard, photo, etc.), simplifying the choices for the user. When the user selects a Quality setting, the Resolution, Ink Type, Ink Set, and Printing Direction controls are disabled.

Different Quality settings are available depending upon the printer's capabilities and the choice of media type; e. g. the higher quality photo settings are not available on plain paper, while draft and economy settings are not available with high quality photo papers. The CUPS driver does not currently enforce these limitations, as the PPD files do not currently support constraints on option values.

In the future, the Quality setting may control other settings as well, such as dither algorithm, image optimization, etc.

8) A new auto-size option for roll paper has been added (currently in the GIMP plug-in only).

9) Preliminary support for the Epson Stylus Photo 935, and the PM-940C and PM-980C.

10) The numeric options now offer increased precision in the CUPS driver, by way of coarse and fine adjustments for each option. The coarse adjustment offers adjustment in units of 0.1; the fine adjustment offers additional increments of 0.005.