This may not be of use to anyone, but I had a fruitful couple of days so I'm posting the result here.
I've an Epson Stylus Color 500 printer which is showing its age now, but still chugs along. However, I wasn't convinced I had the best quality output that could be achieved, so I decided to upgrade my software and drivers. My distro is Slackware 8.0, with few changes. As far as printing is concerned, I had installed Ghostscript 5.50 compiled with Gimp-Print 4.05, apsfilter 6.1.1 and lpd. Gimp-Print was the recommended driver for my printer, but as the latest version was now up to 4.2.1pre3, and contained new features including more options for output quality, I chose to upgrade. Firstly, I removed the old packages: "removepkg ghostscr gs_x11" (gs_x11 is the Ghostscript binary for X). The other related package here, "gsfonts", I left in place for the time being. Originally, I was just going to recompile Ghostscript 5.50 with the new Gimp-Print. If you go to the ftp.slackware.com download site, or an up-to-date mirror, you'll find the directory tree for Slackware-8.0. This contains all the binary packages, along with source for each package and any prerequisites. For the "ghostscr" package, for example, this contains the Ghostscript source and patches, source for jpeg, png and zlib libraries that Ghostscript needs to be compiled against, and a "gs.build" script which you run to compile and install the package on your system. I ran into problems though with the newer version of Gimp-Print. The source package structure is quite different to that of 4.0.5 and as there was stuff expected by the build script which simply didn't exist I decided to try something else. I therefore downloaded the newest version of GNU Ghostscript, 6.53 (Aladding GS is currently 7.04), and compile that with the new Gimp- Print driver. First I needed to install Gimp-Print, which was simply a matter of "./configure ; make ; make install". Job done. Now, to Ghostscript. After unpacking, it required the source for zlib, libpng, and jpeg-6b to be unpacked into its "src" directory. The png and jpeg source I had already from the Slackware-8.0 source tree previously mentioned, but as zlib had recently been upgraded to 1.1.4 for security reasons, I had to get that from the "slackware-current" branch of the download site. To compile GS, I did: "./configure --with-gimp-print ; make ; make install". Then to check the driver was indeed installed, "gs -h", looking for "stp" in the driver list output. The target prefix for the compilation was /usr/local. Anything I compile myself goes there (it's the default almost all the time anyway). However the fonts were still under /usr/share/ghostscript /fonts. So, I just moved them to /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts and everything was dandy. Finally, I needed to look at the options that apsfilter passes to Ghostscript. In the /etc/apsfilter directory there's a sub- directory corresponding to the printer I've set up, called simply Epson500. In there, there's a file "apsfilterrc" in which I can add some options. Previously, I had a line GS_FEATURES='-sQuality="360x360 DPI"' If I wanted the Microweave option available on my printer this would be GS_FEATURES='-sQuality="720x720 DPI Microweave' (I couldn't use Microweave at 360 dpi though, a limitation of the driver at the time. Unfortunately, without Microweave the output can have problems with banding - thin blank lines in places) However the options appropriate for the new Gimp-Print driver had changed, but I didn't know what these were. A post on the linuxprinting.org forum brought a quick response and pointed me to the appropriate section on that website. So now I have in apsfilterrc GS_FEATURES='360mwuni.ps' where "360mwuni.ps" is actually a file in the Ghostscript lib directory /usr/local/share/ghostscript/6.53/lib containing the line <</Quality(360mwuni)>>setpagedevice "360" refers to the resolution, "mw" is Microweave, and "uni" is unidirectional. This seems to offer the best tradeoff in terms of quality and ink usage. So, my print quality has improved, perhaps only slightly, though I certainly have more control over the output. And it wasn't as hard a task as I had anticipated. File locations -------------- GNU Ghostscript can be found at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1897&release_id=73729 Gimp-Print at http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net The Slackware-8.0 GS 5.50 source along with jpeg, png, zlib ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-8.0/source/ap/ghostscr The newer zlib at ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/zlib-1.1.4/source (This is likely to change as Slack gets nearer to the next release but I'm sure there's plenty other of places to get it.) -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
