I have an HP Photosmart 7260 printer which prints great photos when I print from other Linux applications, particularly KDE apps with kprinter. To get good photos I do have to explicitly set the printing mode in the driver settings, but it works well.

It works well in every application *except* the GIMP, that is. The GIMP appears to do some rescaling and adjustment that makes the output look noticeably blurry. I've configured the GIMP to print through kprinter (with command "kprinter -dPhoto --stdin") so that the kprinter dialog pops up and allows me to set the print mode.

What's really annoying about the GIMP not printing nicely is that it makes printing photos a multi-step process. The image viewers I've tried print okay, but they assume 72dpi, rather than whatever I really want (usually 300dpi, but sometimes more or less, depending).

So, my current process is to load the image in the GIMP, use "scale image" to adjust the dpi setting (usually without actually scaling the image) and then save the image as a postscript file. Then I can load the .ps file up in kghostview or whatever and it prints very nicely.

Any ideas what I can do to fix this? I have the GIMP's Image/Output Settings set to all the defaults (Image Type: Photograph, Output: Type Color, all the parameters on the Adjust Output dialog to "1.000"). I'm careful to ensure that I don't have to do any scaling from the print dialog, either... "Scaling" is set to 100.0%.

What else... the printing system is CUPS v1.1.21rc1, the driver for the printer is Foomatic v3.0.2 + hpijs v1.6.2 (configured through the KDE printing manager) the system is Debian unstable, with a 2.6.8 kernel and the GIMP is version 2.0.5.

Thanks for any suggestions,

Shawn.

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On Monday 04 October 2004 10:04 pm, Shawn Willden wrote:

"Scaling" is set to 100.0%.

As Sven pointed out in private e-mail, I misstated here. That's what I get from going from memory. My goal is to avoid scaling (and the quality reduction that may occur), so what I've been doing is using the "Use Original Image Size" button and verifying that the "Scaling" is the right number of PPI (in PPI mode, not Percent mode).

I have been seeing the blurriness without scaling up to the full size of the page, as would happen if Scaling was really at 100%.

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(I hope you don't mind if I post this back to the list, Sven)

On Tuesday 05 October 2004 09:04 am, you wrote:

I have been seeing the blurriness without scaling up to the full size of the page, as would happen if Scaling was really at 100%.

I have no idea what is causing your problems then. I have been told that the gimp-print drivers would create superb printouts. Perhaps you should ask your question on the gimp-print mailing-list. They should know better. The gimp-print project has it's homepage at http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/.

Well, I didn't post there because I'm not using the gimp-print drivers. The gimp-print drives don't support my printer, so I'm using the hpijs driver from HP. My assumption was that the print dialog and whatever it generates to send to the drivers is on the gimp application side, rather than on the gimp-print side, which I believe is only drivers. Is this not correct?

Thanks,

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On Tuesday 05 October 2004 11:27 am, Sven Neumann wrote:

I replied to the list (and to you) so the discussion has been on-list all the time...

Apparently my filters are putting your replies in my Inbox, rather than in my GIMP folder. I'll have to look into why that is. Anyway, sorry for the confusion.

The plug-in that ships with GIMP has been written by the gimp-print developers and it uses libgimpprint. So you are using the gimp-print drivers. I do not know exactly what the plug-in is doing in case of your setup. The gimp-print folks should know better.

Okay, thanks. I'll take my questions over there.

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