Welcome to Gutenprint 5.0.0-rc2! 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, 10.3, and 10.4) 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-rc2 is the second release candidate of Gutenprint 5.0, and incorporates extensive feedback from the first release candidate. It is based on the Gimp-Print 4.3 series that has been in development for over three years, and includes many improvements over the very popular 4.2 series. This release is believed to be quite stable, but further testing is required before final release. We believe this release to be stable enough for day to day use, and encourage people to test it and report their results.

Gutenprint currently contains over 200 drivers supporting in excess of 700 printer models.

The CUPS driver requires CUPS 1.1.15 or higher. If you wish to build this from source, you may need to install a package named "cups-devel" or something similar. Please the rest of the release notes, in particular the Exceptions and Workarounds, for full details on installation, as there is important information to be aware of. 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 Print plug-in for the GIMP requires either the GIMP 2.0 or above, or 1.2.3 or above on the 1.2 line (1.2.5 is recommended), or the GIMP 2.0 or above. You may need to install packages named "gimp-devel", "gtk-devel", and "glib-devel" (or similar equivalents) on many systems. For GIMP 2.0, you may need to install "gimp2-devel", "gtk2-devel", "glib2-devel", and possibly other packages as well. This plug-in will work with any printing system, and offers a comprehensive user interface to control all aspects of the printing process.

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), 10.3 (Panther), and 10.4 (Tiger) 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 strongly 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 for building and installing Gutenprint. * Major changes between Gutenprint 5.0.0 release candidate 1 and Gutenprint 5.0.0 release candidate 2:

1) The Postscript driver now produces more accurate colors. Previous releases produced overly pale colors with the default settings.

2) The Postscript driver now accepts red, green, and blue rather than cyan, magenta, and yellow options in the GIMP plugin.

3) The Postscript driver now prints correctly regardless of image size. Previously it corrupted the output if the width of the image was not a multiple of 4 pixels.

4) The driver package now permits specifying all options regardless of the setting of the Image Type and Quality options (previously it disabled a lot of settings if Quality and/or Image Type were not set to Manual Control). The behavior is now that Quality and Image Type provide defaults that may be overridden by the user. For example, if the resolution is provided explicitly, it will override the resolution implied by the Quality setting.

Related to this, the CUPS driver now handles Quality properly.

5) A description of all options supported by Gutenprint has been added, in doc/gutenprint-options.

6) cups-genppdupdate now preserves the ownership and permissions of the PPD files being updated, rather than forcibly setting the owner to root and the permissions to root read/write and everyone else read-only access.

7) The GIMP plugin now loads the printrc file correctly in all locales. Previously it did not load floating point numbers correctly in locales that don't use the `.' character as the decimal point.

8) The GIMP plugin now offers improved choices in the color adjustment window for viewing individual channels of the output. It now offers red/green/blue, cyan/magenta/yellow, or cyan/magenta/yellow/black as appropriate.

9) The GIMP plugin is now considerably more responsive; many unnecessary screen redraws have been removed. In addition, a display glitch wherein horizontal lines were sometimes drawn through certain widgets has been fixed.

10) The Epson printer utility escputil now reports ink information more consistently across a wider range of printers. In particular, the extended ink information command (escputil -e) should now work correctly on all models from the Stylus Color 740 through the present.

11) Preliminary support for the Epson Stylus C68, C87, C88, CX3700, CX3800, CX3805, CX3810, CX4100, CX4200, CX4500, CX4700, CX4800, CX5700, CX5800, CX7700, CX7800, D68, D88, DX3800, DX3850, DX4200, DX4250, DX4800, PX-A650, and Stylus Photo R220, R320, and R340. These printers are expected to be fully functional (for the multi-function devices, this package supports only the printer function -- it does not support scanning or fax).

12) Preliminary support for the Epson Stylus Photo R2400/PX-5500. This printer has been partially tuned, but there will likely be further changes to this driver.

13) Support for the Epson PictureMate/E-100.

14) Preliminary support for the Epson Stylus Photo RX700/PM-A900. This printer has been partially tuned, but there will likely be further changes to this driver.

15) Initial support for Canon S200, SELPHY CP-510 and SELPHY CP-710; Sony UP-DR150, and Olympus P-11 has been added.

16) The Canon PIXMA iP4000 printers can now print to cds. Duplex printing with binding on the short side is now supported, too.

17) The Epson Stylus Photo R200 and related printers have been retuned to give improved detail in the shadows, reduced ink usage, more accurate grayscale, and more accurate colors. Affected printers are presently the R200, R210, R220, R300, R310, R320, R340, RX400, RX420, RX425, RX430, RX500, RX510, RX600, RX620, RX630, PM-D750, PM-D770, PM-G700, and PM-G720.

Any profiles generated against these printers will have to be re-created.

18) The Epson Stylus Photo R800 and R1800 have been retuned to give improved detail in the shadows, reduced ink usage, more accurate grayscale, and more accurate colors.

Any profiles generated against these printers will have to be re-created.

19) New "transposed" resolutions (1440x720 and 2880x1440) have been added for some Epson printers. These resolutions are actually equivalent to 720x1440 and 1440x2880 DPI respectively. In some cases these may yield better results (specifically, less microbanding) than the normal 1440x720 and 2880x1440 DPI resolutions.

20) Quadtone printing now works correctly regardless of whether color or grayscale mode is selected.

The following bugs have been fixed in Gutenprint 5.0.0-rc2:

1389788 Poor discoverability of advanced options 1389787 CUPS driver does not set Quality correctly 1389785 cups-genppdupdate sets PPD file owners incorrectly 1388615 escputil with Epson CX3700
1304710 Postscript driver corrupts output if width not multiple of 4 1251978 PPD for Stylus Color 600