Gimp-Print 4.3.20, released September 1, 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 4.3.20 contains the following major changes over Gimp-Print 4.3.19:

1) This release offers major improvements in color fidelity, particularly for Epson printers. In particularly, some transition artifacts have been eliminated, the color gamut is improved, and cyan, magenta, red, and green colors are notably better. There is also considerably better (although not perfect) matching between different Epson printers.

The HSL-Adjusted color correction mode has been eliminated; its functionality has been completely subsumed under High Accuracy. Previously, the HSL-Adjusted color correction mode simply performed part of the correction in order to offer more gamut.

The Bright Colors mode now offers considerably more accurate colors and tonality than previously, while still offering maximum color saturation for brilliant colors.

If you have created profiles for use with Gimp-Print, you will need to create new ones. It is currently anticipated that the current color correction will be more stable, with fewer changes, but we can't guarantee that there will not be further improvements. In particular, it is possible that the High Accuracy mode is too saturated (overly vivid colors) on some printers.

Other printer families have not been tuned and are using generic curves copied from the Epson driver. It is likely that these printers will show improvements in color, but optimum color fidelity must await tuning of these printers.

2) Support for the Olympus P-400 and P-300 printers, and the Canon CP-100, CP-200, and CP-300 printers has been added. In addition, certain restrictions on image size have been lifted, enabling printing of images smaller than 4"x6".

3) Ink drop sizes and densities have been recalibrated on many Epson printers, particularly the 4 picolitre drop size printers and the printers using DuraBrite ink (C80 and C82). There proved to be significant errors in the drop sizes, making resolutions less than 2880x720 produce inferior results. In addition, many printers had incorrect density calibration at certain resolutions, generally producing output that is too light.

4) cups-genppdupdate will correctly update PPD files from Gimp-Print 4.3.19.

5) Minor problems with the man pages have been fixed.

6) Matte Paper Heavyweight has been added to the list of supported papers on Epson printers.