Does 2.0 have any functioning print plugin? If not, what changes need to be made to the current 4.2-based plugin?

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:49:13 +0100 From: Dave Neary

Robert L Krawitz wrote: > Does 2.0 have any functioning print plugin? If not, what changes need > to be made to the current 4.2-based plugin?

As far as I know, if you have gimp-print 4.2.x installed, it will be used for the gimp-print plug-in. The plug-in has been updated to the 2.0 API.

It would be nice to have the plug-in updated to 4.4.0 when it comes out (which should be any day now, I think) - in fact, if 4.4 comes out this week, it would be nice to be able to use that for The GIMP 2.0 (imho).

I'm the Gimp-Print project lead, that's why I asked the question :-)

Gimp-Print 5.0 alpha came out a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, the real 5.0 is a ways out yet, and there's going to be a significant API change in the next alpha release (hopefully that will be the last one -- it fixes the specification of input and output modes).

In the 5.0 tree, the plugin has been split into two pieces, a UI library (libgimpprintui) and the GIMP plugin proper (which is tiny, and contains all of the GIMP-specific code). We should work out the appropriate ownership of of these two components, and the correct dividing line.

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 14:25:23 +0100 From: Dave Neary

Hi,

Robert L Krawitz wrote: > I'm the Gimp-Print project lead, that's why I asked the question :-)

I know :) Sorry to hear the 5.0 release is still a bit away.

> In the 5.0 tree, the plugin has been split into two pieces, a UI > library (libgimpprintui) and the GIMP plugin proper (which is tiny, > and contains all of the GIMP-specific code). We should work out the > appropriate ownership of of these two components, and the correct > dividing line.

It would be really great if you would continue to maintain the gimp-print plug-in that's in GIMP CVS. Understandably, since gimp-print is now very much its own project, our release schedules aren't going to match up for the most part, but currently the goal would be to support the latest stable release of gimp-print in the GIMP.

Having 2 GIMP plug-ins (1 in gimp-print that's based on the last stable GIMP and another in the GIMP that's based on the last stable gimp-print) doesn't really make sense. I would propose that the gimp-print plug-in gets updated in the GIMP tree when the libgimp API changes, and then gets updated to use the new gimpprint when a stable release comes out.

The current plugin (based on 4.2) is basically in sustaining at this point, and really approaching EOL. We're hardly even fixing bugs in 4.2 any more. We're probably going to do one more 4.2 release for a few bugs, an OS X problem that isn't a Gimp-Print problem but which gets blamed on it, and a couple of new Epson printers. But that won't cause you any problems. I'm not going to remove it from our source base, since there will be very few 4.2 releases left.

The plugin in our 5.0 tree is another matter. Since the 5.0 API isn't locked down, it's premature (IMHO) to transfer it to the GIMP. There are major structural changes from the 4.2 plugin; in particular, it has been split into two pieces, libgimpprint and the Print plugin proper.

libgimpprint is a GTK+ (1.2 right now) UI, without any linkage to libgimp. The GIMP-specific code is in the plugin, consisting of 4 files of less than 1000 lines of code:

457 1492 11003 print-image-gimp.c 425 1418 13702 print.c
55 222 1590 print_gimp.h 38 199 1372 print-intl.h 975 3331 27667 total

The question is what should be transferred to the GIMP when our API stabilizes. Certainly the core GIMP plugin is a good candidate, but libgimpprintui is less clear. It's actually much larger than the plugin proper (and badly in need of cleanup). It could at least in principle be used as a print facility by other GTK-based applications, although it's not completely general (it only handles single pages).

4438 12230 136157 panel.c 1371 3945 36094 plist.c
155 465 3964 print-image-thumbnail.c 44 215 1385 printrc.h
105 382 3287 printrcl.l
285 654 6321 printrcy.y
869 2482 25134 ui-utils.c
7267 20373 212342 total

(I'd ideally like to support both a 4.2 and a 5.0 plugin concurrently, because people who have built workflows around 4.2 may not want to switch in one shot.)

From: Sven Neumann
Date: 12 Mar 2004 14:19:13 +0100

Robert L Krawitz writes:

> In the 5.0 tree, the plugin has been split into two pieces, a UI > library (libgimpprintui) and the GIMP plugin proper (which is tiny, > and contains all of the GIMP-specific code). We should work out the > appropriate ownership of of these two components, and the correct > dividing line.

There's still a GIMP plug-in in the 5.0 tree? Now I am confused. I thought our plan to get rid of that circularity was that you drop the GIMP plug-in entirely and leave it up to the GIMP team to provide a plug-in that builds on the gimp-print library. Is that not the plan?

See my previous reply to Dave Nearly on this. That's the plan, but there are architectural and execution issues to be worked.

I'm hoping to do a lot of work and get close to locking down the 5.0 API this weekend, although I don't know whether I'll manage to complete everything. The changes I want to do will generalize the input mode support, so you really want them in place before GEGL (and for that matter the Cinepaint folks really need these changes too). I want to stabilize the 5.0 API, and hopefully have something that will be backward compatible at 5.2, so it's premature to transfer ownership yet.

From: Sven Neumann
Date: 12 Mar 2004 14:04:47 +0100

Robert L Krawitz writes:

> Does 2.0 have any functioning print plugin? If not, what changes > need to be made to the current 4.2-based plugin?

It has a functional print plug-in based on gimp-print 4.2.

For GIMP-2.2, we'd like to provide a print plug-in based on a newer gimp-print release (that would be 5.0 then?). Perhaps we would even do that change in some 2.0.x release. It depends on the timing of your releases and whether someone does the necessary hacking.

You probably won't want to pick up a 5.0-based plugin during a stable sequence, since it's very different (you might want to have two plugins, but then we'll need to have two separate printrc files, since the file format has changed incompatibly). It will probably be easier to do in 2.2.

From: Sven Neumann
Date: 13 Mar 2004 03:45:21 +0100

Robert L Krawitz writes:

> libgimpprint is a GTK+ (1.2 right now) UI, without any linkage to > libgimp.

It will have to be ported to the GTK+-2.x API if you want it to be useful. Are there any plans to do that?

No, but we could use a volunteer.