File Release Notes and Changelog
Release Name: 5.0.2
Notes:
Welcome to Gutenprint 5.0.2! Please read these release notes
carefully.
Gutenprint, formerly named 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, 10.3, 10.4,
and 10.5) and Linux systems that in many cases equal or exceed
proprietary vendor-supplied drivers in quality and functionality, and
can be used for demanding printing tasks requiring flexibility and
high quality. This software package includes an enhanced Print
plug-in for GIMP that replaces the plug-in packaged with GIMP, and
Ghostscript and CUPS drivers, as well as Foomatic data supporting the
Ghostscript driver.
Gutenprint has been renamed in order to clearly distinguish it from
GIMP. While this package started out as the original Print plugin
for GIMP, it has expanded into a collection of general purpose
printer drivers, and the new, enhanced Print plugin for GIMP is
now only a small part of the package. Furthermore, the name
Gutenprint recognizes Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable
type printing press. Finally, the word "guten" means "good" in
German.
Gutenprint 5.0.2 is a stable release of Gutenprint 5.0, with bug fixes
and new features.
Gutenprint currently supports over 800 printer models.
These release notes contain the following sections:
I) General Requirements
II) Changes from Previous Releases
* New features and fixes in 5.0.2
* New features and fixes in 5.0.1
III) Overall changes from 4.2 to 5.0.
A) General user-visible changes
B) New Functionality
C) Changes to the Print plugin for the GIMP
D) Changes to the CUPS interface
E) Changes to the Ghostscript driver
F) Changes to the Foomatic data generator
G) Quality improvements
H) Architectural Changes
IV) Exceptions and Workarounds
A) General Issues
B) Build/Installation Issues
================================================================
I) GENERAL REQUIREMENTS
Gutenprint will run on any reasonably modern computer running Linux,
Macintosh OS X (10.2 or above), Solaris, or any other UNIX-like
operating system. If you plan to compile this package from source,
you will also need an ANSI C compiler, such as gcc (recommended). A
compiler is not required if you are installing a pre-compiled package.
Processor and memory requirements vary depending upon the printer and
runtime options selected; it is suggested that you have at least 64 MB
of memory for general purpose printing, 256 MB or more for high
quality printing on a good printer, and 1 GB or more for large format
printing at high resolution. You should have at least 50 MB of free
disk space to compile and install Gutenprint. Disk space requirements
for printing will vary depending upon how you use Gutenprint, but are
generally modest except as noted below. We recommend a processor
speed of at least 300 MHz. Fast printers may require a faster
processor to achieve maximum printing speed.
For general use, you should have the Common UNIX Printing System, CUPS
(version 1.1.15 or above) or Foomatic (2.0 or above) installed.
Please the rest of the release notes, in particular the Exceptions and
Workarounds, for full details on installation, as there is important
information to be aware of. CUPS is the printing system used on
Macintosh OS X 10.2 and above, and many other systems use it. The
combination of CUPS and Gutenprint provides a flexible, general
purpose printing system capable of producing the highest quality
output with any of the printers supported by this package. We
strongly recommend using CUPS with Gutenprint as a general-purpose
printing solution.
The enhanced Print plug-in for GIMP requires either GIMP 2.0 or above,
or 1.2.3 or above on the 1.2 line (1.2.5 is recommended). This
plug-in will work with any printing system, and offers a comprehensive
user interface to control all aspects of the printing process. If you
are printing photographs in large format from GIMP at very high
resolution, disk space requirements may be substantial, and we
recommend at least 2 GB of free disk space for that purpose.
The Ghostscript driver requires GNU Ghostscript 6.53 or higher, ESP
Ghostscript 7.05 or higher, or AFPL Ghostscript 7.04 or higher. It
uses the IJS package included with these versions of Ghostscript to
create a driver that may be built much more easily than traditional
Ghostscript drivers. This driver should be used in conjunction with
Foomatic to configure printers.
Users of Macintosh OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), 10.3 (Panther), 10.4 (Tiger),
and 10.5 (Leopard) can use this package, as the printing system is
based on CUPS. For ease of installation, a pre-built package with
installer is normally supplied a few days after the release of the
source package. We strongly recommend that OS X users use the
pre-built package rather than attempt to build it themselves.
NOTE: This package will not work with any version of OS X 10.0 and
10.1 (such as 10.1.5). The printing system used with these versions
of OS X is not compatible with Gutenprint. OS X 10.2 and above use
CUPS as the basis of the printing system, which is compatible with
Gutenprint.
The README file included with this package provides full instructions
for building and installing Gutenprint.
================================================================
II) MAJOR CHANGES FROM PREVIOUS RELEASES
*) NEW FEATURES AND FIXES IN GUTENPRINT 5.0.2:
1) New printers supported in this release:
* Epson inkjet printers:
Epson Stylus CX4400
Epson Stylus CX4900
Epson Stylus CX5600
Epson Stylus CX7400
Epson Stylus CX9400
Epson Stylus DX4050
Epson Stylus Photo RX595
Epson Stylus C110
Epson Stylus C120
Epson Stylus D120
Epson PM 670C
Epson PX V780
* Canon inkjet printers:
Canon MP710
Canon MP740
* PCL laser printers:
Sharp AR-M257
HP LserJet 1022
2) Preliminary support for the following printers:
* Canon inkjet printers:
Canon BJC5100
Canon BJC5500
Canon BJC8500
Canon Pixma iP4500
Canon Pixma iP5300
Canon Pixma iP8500
Canon Pixma iX5000
Canon Pixma MP170
Canon Pixma MP180
Canon Pixma MP610
Canon Pixma Pro 9500
Canon i80
* Dye sublimation printers:
Canon SELPHY ES1 (*)
Canon SELPHY ES2 (*)
Canon SELPHY ES20(*)
Shinko CHC S9045
(*) Note that these printers may not work on all systems due to
communication requirements.
3) All native CUPS PPD files are now perfectly compliant with the
PPD specification, as tested under CUPS 1.2. Fixing this
requires some changes to the internal resolution names. These
changes should be transparent if PPD files are updated with
cups-genppdupdate.5.1.
4) Borderless printing on the Epson Stylus Photo 2200 now works
correctly.
5) The printer maintenance utility for EPSON inkjet printers,
escputil, now reports status more reliably. Previously some
people reported errors of the form "Unknown IEEE 1284.4 error";
these errors have been resolved.
In addition, escputil now correctly reports the ink color for
certain printers (in particular, printers using Claria (TM) inks
and printers using alternate ink cartridges (for example, the
Stylus Photo 1400 that allows either a photo black or a matte
black ink cartridge to be installed).
6) A bug in which certain data was not printed correctly by Canon
inkjet printers was fixed (in areas where the entire area was
filled with maximum color density, some lines could be silently
discarded).
7) A bug involving excessive memory consumption in certain cases
has been fixed. Printing multiple page documents on Canon
inkjet printers with the Duplex option set to Long Edge resulted
in very large memory consumption on alternate pages, which was
not released until the job completed. For example, in color at
600 DPI, the memory consumption would be about 120 megabytes on
alternate pages, so printing a 100 page document would result in
6 GB of memory consumption. Depending upon the system, the
results might be that the job would fail to print or would only
partially print, the system might run very slowly while the job
was being processed, or other components of the system might
fail.
8) Various fixes for the Canon iP4000, iP4200, and i560. Color
improvements have been made on the iP4200.
9) The paper size for the CD - Custom paper size has been changed
to 120 mm from 118.8 mm to allow correct printing from CUPS.
10) A compile problem on Solaris has been fixed.
11) It is now possible to specify the printer model to all escputil
commands, via the -m option. It is no longer necessary to use
the -u option to specify a new printer vs. an old printer.
12) The Epson driver will not select resolutions higher than
5760x1440 for the automatic quality settings, as we have
determined that many current printers offer poor quality at the
bottom of the page with resolutions of 2880x2880 and 5760x2880.
We have not removed these resolutions altogether, as they may
work well for certain applications, but they will not be
automatically selected by the Best or Ultra Photo quality
settings.
13) A problem where in some cases certain options were not handled
correctly by the CUPS driver has been fixed. In particular,
yes/no options such as borderless printing were not handled
correctly in all cases when the printing system is CUPS 1.2 or
1.3.
14) The CUPS driver in Gutenprint, and all associated utilities,
are now licensed as GPL v2 or higher. That code was previously
licensed as GPL v2 only. While that did not cause any direct
problems, since the CUPS driver does not form a library that
other code may wish to link against, it was licensed differently
from the rest of the Gutenprint project. That is now resolved,
and the entire Gutenprint code base is now licensed as GPL v2 or
higher.
Changes:
