Welcome to Gimp-Print 5.0 Beta 2! Please read these release notes carefully.

Gimp-Print 5.0.0-beta2 is the second beta prerelease of Gimp-Print 5.0. It is based on the 4.3 series that has been in development for over 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, or the GIMP 2.0 or 2.1. 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 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.

These release notes contain the following sections:

1) Changes from 5.0.0-beta1 to 5.0.0-beta2 2) Overall changes from 4.2 to 5.0.
3) List of supported printers
4) Printer-specific notes

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* Major changes between Gimp-Print 5.0.0 beta 1 and 5.0.0 beta 2:

1) Color generation has been adjusted to improve tonality. The result should be more definition in the highlights and shadows and overall lighter tone without reducing maximum density.

This has been tested on some Epson printers, but has not been comprehensively tested. Please report any issues you may find.

Note that this change invalidates any profiles generated for earlier versions of Gimp-Print. It is likely that additional changes will be made prior to 5.0 final release.

2) Printing direct to CD on Epson printers that support it now works. In addition, a choice of center hole size (16 mm or 43 mm) is now offered. A fine adjustment is provided to permit control over positioning of the image on the CD. This fine adjustment setting is not available in the Foomatic interface at present.

It is likely that this support will be further enhanced prior to final release of 5.0.

3) Additional dye sublimation printers (Canon CP-220 and CP-330, Olympus P-200 and P-400) are now supported; the Olympus P-10 is now partially supported.

4) Preliminary support for the Epson Stylus C45, C46, C65, C66, C85, C86, CX-6600 and PX-V600.

5) Additional page sizes are now available for Olympus and related photo printers (including certain Canon and Sony dye sublimation printers). In addition, other supported page sizes now work correctly on the Canon CP-100.

6) Ink drop sizes have been retuned for all 2880 DPI capable Epson Stylus printers that use 4 pl drops (e. g. Stylus Color 880, Stylus Photo 780). These should give better results at resolutions below 2880x720 DPI. Please let us know if they don't on any given printer.

7) A problem whereby the CUPS driver was linked incorrectly in certain configurations is fixed.

8) The GIMP 2.0 plugin is now installed correctly in the GIMP 2.0 plugin directory, rather than the GIMP 1.2 directory.

9) A problem with the GIMP plugin not properly exiting at the completion of printing has been fixed. This was reported on FreeBSD 4.10 and is system dependent. The symptom is that at when the print plugin finished its work it would stick around, and actual printing would not start until the GIMP itself was exited.

10) The GIMP plugins now use less screen space by scrolling certain options.

11) Black generation has been improved for the Epson Stylus Photo R300 and related printers on many older paper types. In particular, more black ink is now being used, which should give more solid shadows with less color shift.

12) A "predithered" color correction mode is now available, in conjunction with a "predithered" dither algorithm. These very fast algorithms assume that the data has already been screened, and simply perform a threshold with no correction whatsoever. This is useful for certain custom applications.

13) The GIMP 2.0 plugin now uses new curve widgets, replacing the GTK+ curve widgets. These widgets will undergo further development, adding new functionality.

14) A problem with Canon 6-color inkjet printers whereby the transition between light and dark inks is fixed. This problem was specific to the 4.3/5.0 code line and was a regression from 4.2.

15) A problem with Canon printers in DMT mode whereby vertical lines were printed across the page is fixed. This problem was specific to the 4.3/5.0 code line and was a regression from 4.2.

16) A few problems with the display of the preview window in the GIMP plugin (both 1.2 and 2.0) are fixed.

17) Gimp-Print now compiles correctly on Solaris.

18) The GIMP 2.0 plugin now handles the version 3 printrc file correctly.

19) The printers.xml file now has a more flexible format that permits specifying arbitrary parameters.

20) A problem trying to print a grayscale file from the GIMP with a pre-existing printrc file predating Gimp-Print 5.0 alpha-2 has been fixed. Depending upon the system, the bug could cause data corruption, a crash at startup, or erroneous display in the preview window.

21) A problem whereby compiling with --enable-static fails in some circumstances has been fixed.

The following bugs have been fixed in this release:

951558 gimp-print 5.0.0-alpha3, bugs with --enable-static 980678 Canon DMT not correct
981304 gimp2 print plugin installed in wrong directory 981759 5.0.0-beta1 doesn't compile on sparc sunos 5.7 982642 Canon 6200 Photo Ink Problems 1000661 GIMP plugin does not refresh preview correctly in some cases 1001029 Auto orientation not updated in preview (causes jumbling) 1001267 GIMP2 plugin does not handle v3 printrc format 1002380 Printing grayscale image w/old printrc file crashes at start 1003003 CUPS executables linked incorrectly 1013465 QUALITY - highlights and shadows blown out 1013470 QUALITY - ESP R300 generates poor black 1013565 GIMP plugin may not exit at completion