Gimp-Print 4.3.7, released January 4, 2003, is a development release of this package.

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).

The CUPS driver requires CUPS 1.1.9 or higher. 1.1.14 or above is highly recommended, as certain translation-related bugs are fixed and it is possible to print true CMYK.

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 4.3.7 is considered to be an unstable release, as more significant API changes have been introduced with relatively limited testing. While most of the changes improve the clarity of the code, the limited testing and extensive nature of the changes suggests that this release is likely to be quite unstable. We recommend that only people who want access to these new API features for development use this release. There are very significant user-visible changes over earlier 4.3 releases, and few changes over the 4.2 stable line.

Gimp-Print 4.3.7 contains the following major changes over Gimp-Print 4.3.6:

1) Further internal API changes. Please see include/gimp-print/gimp-print.h, and the various header files in src/main, for details. There will be significant further changes, particularly in the color code. The API is considerably more consistent than before.

2) Parameters are now stored as variables within stp_vars_t, rather than as fixed fields. This change is largely transparent at the API level, but it marks an important advance.

3) The Gimp Print plugin has been split into a GTK-based library (libgimpprintui) and the actual Print plugin. The libgimpprintui code permits creating print panels for other applications, or standalone graphical print utilities, all using the same user interface.

In addition, the thumbnail preview mechanism has been changed to use the stp_image_t API rather than to make direct calls to the color machinery. This was done by creating a new family driver (print-raw.c) and by creating a new stp_image_t implementation for thumbnail creation. This removed the only reason to export the color API, and will permit us to simplify the very complex color API. This work is currently in progress.

To simplify coding while avoiding an unnecessary dependency, some widgets have been borrowed from libgimp.

The two files comprising the Gimp plugin proper total less than 900 lines of code, out of about 60,000 lines total in the core library, UI library, and Print plugin.

This work is not complete; support for multiple pages still needs to be added, for example. However, there should be a sufficient base to permit interested developers to experiment.

A very desirable project that someone may wish to undertake is to write a ghostscript front end (or extension to ghostview or gv) that uses this UI library. This would create a full-featured graphical printing application.

4) Many parameters for Epson printer control, dither matrix control, and HSL adjustment have been exported as settable parameters. While currently no Gimp-print applications provide access to these controls, they are available for developer use. Please read the code to see where they are made available. This is a work in progress; expect major changes in the future.

5) A new header file, gimp-print-version.h, has been created to store the autogen-time versioning information.

6) The Gimp Print plugin now uses g_message to deliver error messages to pop-ups rather than to stderr.