This is the third alpha release (and hopefully the last before beta) for gimp-print. This is a major update. There are two problems beyond those noted in the release notes: 1) Printing position is incorrect on the Epson Stylus Color 800 (the same issue we had on the 850). 2) The Ghostscript driver documentation refers to a -Dither option. That is incorrect; it is -sDither. Here are the release notes: 1) The brightness, contrast, and color level controls have changed incompatibly in both the plugin and the Ghostscript driver. The controls now adjust cyan, magenta, and yellow levels. In addition, all controls are now arbitrary values centered around 1, rather than some being centered around 1 and some being integer values centered around 100. Furthermore, the action of the color level controls is now much more what would be expected. The cyan, magenta, and yellow controls can be used to balance the printer grayscale. Plug-in users: please be sure to check the color values in the Adjust Color window before printing or reporting a problem. Use the Set Defaults button to bring them back to reasonable defaults. Ghostscript users: please see the Color Balancing Values section of Ghost/README for details. 2) The MediaSource argument in the Ghostscript driver has been renamed InputSlot, to conform to the PPD standard. Therefore, any uses of Ghostscript that use this argument must change. 3) There is a new Fast dither algorithm. This produces greatly improved speed at some cost in image quality. It gives poor results on 6-color printers when used in 6-color mode. In black and white mode, the results are generally quite acceptable. 4) Performance has been improved to some degree in all modes. This will probably be most noticeable when printing text, and when printing at a higher resolution than the source image is sampled at. 5) Density is now computed correctly in 1440x720 mode on Canon printers. 6) Positioning should now be correct on the Epson Stylus Color 850 and similar printers. 7) The inlining problems with egcs 1.1.2 are now fixed properly, so inlining is re-enabled. 8) The problem with blank splotches is now fixed. It was closely related to the other inlining problems (which weren't really inlining problems at all). 9) Ink densities and other color parameters have been tuned for additional paper types. In particular, plain paper and generic ink jet paper should now work reasonably well. 10) Monochrome mode prints with correct density on variable dot size printers (it was printing too light or entirely incorrectly). 11) The Gimp-based GUI (usable only with Gimp 1.1.22+) has been extensively reorganized. 12) Monochrome (fast black-only) mode works correctly on variable dot size printers. 13) HP printers with multiple input sources now print correctly by default (using the standard paper source rather than the manual feed). 14) Bug fixes to the Canon driver for certain printers. 15) Preliminary support for the Epson Stylus Photo 2000P, Stylus Color 880, and Stylus Color 980. The 880 and 980 should work reasonably well. The 2000P has not been tuned. 16) Performance and print quality on the Epson Stylus Color 900 is improved. 17) There have been some miscellaneous improvements (or at least changes) in color generation. 18) Images will now print to their exact specified size. In previous versions, if percentage scaling was used, the scale was effectively rounded down to the next percentage point. 19) The height/width entries are more accurate, and do not automatically set the scaling mode to PPI. 20) Preliminary support for the Epson Stylus Color 880 and 980 printers. 21) Miscellaneous bug fixes for certain Epson Stylus printers. ERRATA: 1) The PDQ and CUPS descriptor files have still not been updated. 2) Printers other than Epson Stylus printers are in an unknown state of tuning. Unless testers step forward, the these printers will not be tuned in the final release! 3) Documentation is still almost nonexistent. 4) Red Hat 6.1 users cannot configure the plug-in. The problem is that neither the gimp nor the gimp-devel rpm's in that release include gimptool, which is necessary for configuration to work. The recommended solution is to recompile the Gimp from source (either 1.0.4 or the latest 1.1/1.2 release). That will install gimptool, and you will then be able to build the plug-in. This does not affect the Ghostscript driver. This is not planned to be fixed in the 4.0 release. 5) In some cases, when the scaling has been set to PPI mode, the plugin will start at the minimum PPI allowed for the image (maximum permitted image size). It is not understood why this is happening. 6) There are some known color generation problems. In particular, greens (particularly weakly saturated greens) tend to be quite weak, giving grass a somewhat tan look. These will not be fixed for 4.0.
