Welcome to Gutenprint 5.0.0-beta4! Please read these release notes carefully.

Gutenprint, formerly named 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.

The package has been renamed in order to clearly distinguish it from the GIMP. While this package started out as the Print plugin for the GIMP, it has expanded into a collection of general purpose printer drivers, and the Print plugin for the GIMP is now only a small (but important) piece of the package. Furthermore, the name Gutenprint recognizes Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable type printing press. Finally, the word "guten" means "good" in German.

Gutenprint 5.0.0-beta3 is the third beta prerelease of Gutenprint 5.0. It is based on the Gimp-Print 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.

Gutenprint 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 Gutenprint 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 Gutenprint 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.

* Major changes between Gutenprint 5.0.0 beta 3 and Gutenprint 5.0.0 beta 4:

1) The Foomatic data generator and ijsgutenprint (the Ghostscript driver) now works correctly and supports the full range of options. However, due to Foomatic limitations, additional steps may be required to install the data and generate correct PPD files. Please read these instructions carefully if you decide to use Foomatic with Gutenprint 5.0.0-beta4.

* The Foomatic driver is now named "gutenprint-ijs.5.0". When you use foomatic-compiledb, foomatic-combo-xml or foomatic-ppdfile, you must specify the driver name appropriately. This permits installation of multiple releases of Gutenprint on the same system.

* Before installing Gutenprint 5.0.0-beta4, you must manually remove any existing Foomatic option files. This is because the Foomatic utility to load data kits (foomatic-kitload) does not remove obsolete data files from the Foomatic database. If you do not do this, any PPD files you generate will be incorrect and printing may work incorrectly or not at all.

Foomatic option files are usually located in

/usr/local/share/foomatic/db/source/opt

or

/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/opt

Assuming they're in the former location, you must remove data files associated with the Gutenprint driver. The command to do this, which must be run as the superuser (root) is

cd /usr/local/share/foomatic/db/source/opt ls -l gutenprint-ijs*.xml

If there are existing files present, you must remove them:

rm -f gutenprint-ijs*.xml

Now check to make sure that they are gone:

ls -l gutenprint-ijs*.xml

CAUTION: Be very careful when typing this command! Minor errors in typing these commands may result in severe damage to your system.

After this, you may run 'make install' in your Gutenprint source directory to install the package. You will then need to re-create any printer queues using Foomatic.

In general, you will have to perform this procedure any time you install a new version of Gutenprint.

Please check the Foomatic site (http://www.linuxprinting.org/foomatic.html) and the Gutenprint site (http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net) for updated instructions about this.

* Unlike with the CUPS native driver, there is no simple way to update all PPD files when you install a new version of Gutenprint. You must either use the foomatic-ppdfile command to upgrade PPD files individually, or foomatic-compiledb to build all PPD files.

* From this point forward, the Foomatic data will be version locked to the Gutenprint release installed on the system. For example, PPD files generated with the Foomatic data for this release will not work with the ijsgutenprint in the next release. This is to prevent accidentally using incorrect data, which could cause incorrect function to take place.

2) Various problems with the native CUPS driver have been fixed:

* The driver can now print directly to CD's with Epson printers that support this functionality (e. g. the Stylus Photo R300). In 5.0.0-beta3 and earlier, attempts to do so would have failed with a message in the CUPS error log about options not being verified correctly. If LogLevel=Debug were set in cupsd.conf, the options that would have failed to verify would have been CDInnerRadius and perhaps PageSize. There was no workaround save to print from the GIMP plugin. This fixes bug 1179480.

* It is now possible to select any page size when printing to CD. It is still recommended to select CD - 5 inch or CD - 3 inch, but other sizes will work and will be treated as a 5 inch CD. If the page size selected is larger than 5 inches, the image will be cropped to 5 inches; if it is smaller, it will be expanded.

This functionality is specific to the CUPS driver. In the GIMP plugin, the only page sizes permitted are 5 inch and 3 inch CD.

* An error message ("Unable to get media size") emitted when a custom page size was set has been converted to a debug message.

* More useful error messages are generated when incorrect combinations of options are chosen. In particular, the incorrect options and values are properly identified.

* The debug messages have been enhanced to allow tracing all option settings.

3) The Epson Stylus Photo R800 and R1800 are now fully supported in 6-color mode, for resolutions up to 2880x2880 DPI. The use of gloss enhancer is now supported, although not used by default.

It is likely that further tuning work will be performed on this printer, so colors may not be the same as in future releases.

4) The definitions for the Epson Stylus CX3500, 3600, and 3650 have been corrected, and these multi-function devices now work correctly. Additional Epson multi-function devices have also been added to the driver.

5) It is now possible to print to A4-size sheet paper on HP DesignJet large-format plotter/printers.

6) With the Ghostscript driver, it is now possible to select any page size when printing to CD. It is still recommended to select CD - 5 inch or CD - 3 inch, but other sizes will work and will be treated as a 5 inch CD. The page will be expanded or shrunk to fit (not cropped).

7) Various improvements have been made to escputil, the command-line Epson inkjet printer management utility. The changes are quite extensive, and we would like feedback on their operation.

* A new extended ink information command has been added. This command, which is supported on printers with separate individual ink cartridges, prints additional information about the ink cartridge in addition to the amount of ink present. On older printers, it simply returns the standard ink information.

* Ink level detection now works on all known supported printers. Previously it did not work on some newer printers. However, it is somewhat slower on these printers than it is on older printers that support the faster ink detection method.

* Ink level detection now prints the correct ink color names for the printer model.

* It may be necessary to use the -m option (to specify the printer) with certain printers, even with commands such as -i. This was previously not the case. In general, it should not be necessary.

* It is now no longer necessary to use the -u flag with certain printers in most cases. The utility now autodetects the printer model and generates appropriate commands in all cases.

If you supply a printer queue (with the -P option) rather than a raw device (with the -r option), you will still need to provide the -u flag, as the utility cannot detect the actual printer connected to a queue. However, bidirectional commands (ink level, identify, printer status, and alignment) do not require the -u flag any more.

* escputil now successfully detects ink level, printer model, and status even if the printer is out of ink.

8) The CUPS driver offers a new Color Precision option that enables use of 16-bit printing with ESP Ghostscript 8.15 or Apple Macintosh OS X 10.4 ("Tiger"). Setting Color Precision to "Best" enables 16-bit printing if the system supports it; setting it to "Normal" uses 8-bit printing. Setting Color Precision to "Best" has no effect if the version of CUPS does not support 16-bit printing; in that case, "Best" is still 8-bit.

The higher precision may improve results with certain source material, particularly if it contains smooth color gradients. The result would be freedom from banding, particularly in highlights where it might be visible with 8-bit color computation. It may be somewhat slower than 8-bit printing.

9) The Print plugin now functions correctly even if a printer queue name contains shell metacharacters.

10) The IJS-based Ghostscript driver is now installed as "ijsgutenprint.5.0". This permits installation of multiple releases of Gutenprint on the same system.

11) Preliminary support for Epson Colorio PM-G800 and PM-G820 (Japan-market printers using 1.5 pl drops with traditional photo inks). Also added other recent Japan-market printers assumed to be programmatically identical to existing printers.

12) The old man pages, and src/ghost/README, have been withdrawn. These pages, and the Ghostscript README file, were based on the Gimp-Print 4.2 options, which were much less fluid than the current option system. It is not practical to keep them up to date in any meaningful way. Our recommendation is that people use either the native CUPS driver or Foomatic to manage options rather than attempt to create and manage printer queues by hand.

13) The source browser in the documentation package has been removed. This information, which consists of color-coded source, is of little interest to the vast majority of users and consumes a significant amount of space in the installation.