Welcome to Gimp-Print 5.0 Alpha 3! Please read these release notes carefully.

Gimp-Print 5.0.0-alpha3 is the third alpha release (technology preview) in the line that will eventually lead to Gimp-Print 5.0. It is based on the 4.3 series that has been in development for 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 (more recent versions of the GIMP, such as 1.3 and 2.0, are not supported at present). 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.

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* Major changes between Gimp-Print 5.0.0 alpha 2 and 5.0.0 alpha 3:

1) Borderless printing now works correctly in the native CUPS driver. In previous releases it printed garbage. Note that while borderless printing works correctly in CUPS, the actual prints don't come out perfectly borderless in all cases.

2) A problem manifesting itself as unprinted horizontal stripes within a page has been fixed.

3) A number of crash problems in the Print plugin have been fixed, and potential crash problems in the core library have been fixed.

4) The CUPS driver now prints correctly at 1440x1440 DPI on certain Epson printers. Previously it rendered at 2880x1440, which in addition to being slower could also cause incorrect results on certain types of material.

5) A minor compliance issue in the CUPS PPD files is fixed.

6) Boolean options are handled correctly in the Foomatic data.

7) escputil now returns ink levels correctly on all Epson printers. In addition, it is more robust on printers that it previously worked correctly on.

8) The header files have been reorganized; all header files intended for use by either client programs or modules (such as family drivers) have been moved to include/gimp-print. Client programs should continue to #include as before. Modules should #include . All
routines and objects intended for use by either modules or clients are now prefixed "stp_" rather than "stpi_" as was the case for routines intended for use by modules.

9) There are a number of API changes in this release that are incompatible with earlier 4.3/5.0 alpha releases. In particular:

* All data types are forward-declared structs rather than void pointers. This enables the compiler to type check programs more effectively and makes it more clear that the object is being passed by reference.

* All functions ending in _free have been renamed to _destroy:

stp_curve_free => stp_curve_destroy stp_string_list_free => stp_string_list_destroy stp_vars_free => stp_vars_destroy stp_parameter_list_free => stp_parameter_list_destroy stp_parameter_description_free => stp_parameter_description_destroy

* All functions intended for use by modules have had their prefix renamed from stpi_ to stp_.

This is planned to be the last incompatible API change in the 5.0 development line. Therefore, we would like all authors of client programs to inspect and test this thoroughly and report issues. There may be minor compatible API changes.

10) The libprintut utility library has been removed. Its functionality has been subsumed into the core Gimp-Print library.

11) More header files have been documented with Doxygen.