Re: [Gimp-print-devel] Status of Canon MP980 support + help proposal

[Melvin H. <mel...@fr...>]

Sascha Sommer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Montag, 18. Mai 2009, Melvin Hadasht wrote:
>> Hi,
(...)
> The first problematic part is to figure out the protocol of the driver and 
> once this is done the instructions that are needed to program the printer.
> You could do this already before you buy the printer with the print to file 
> option that you mentioned in your other mail. I wrote a small utility called 
> pixma_parse that can be found in the test subdirectory of the gutenprint 
> sources. It can be used to parse such printjobs. It is generally a good sign 
> when PIXMA parse is able to understand such printjobs because this would mean 
> that most required features for basic printing are already supported by the 
> canon driver.
> 

Good news, it seems that pixma_parse is able to read the output from the 
driver.  It also outputs the image. No unknown code, at the moment.

I found that the driver seems to request "Color y", but MP980 does not 
have light yellow (but instead has a gray ink, maybe it is that).

It seems to be encouraging...

> After that one has to create a new printer entry for the printer in gutenprint 
> that makes sure that the printjobs are created with the right options. I can 
> help you there if you provide me a printjob that was generated with the print 
> to file option. Unfortunatelly every changed print option in the windows 
> driver will result in a slightly different printjob so getting most options 
> to work is almost impossible. It is probably the best to concentrate only on 
> a few paper, quality and mode settings.

I'll try to issue print jobs with different settings and study the code.

> If all this worked you can send images to the printer. These images may or may 
> not have accurate colors etc. but imo this is enough for basic printing.

> The other big task is then to improve the color accuracy so that the printer 
> can also be used for photos or higher quality printouts.
> I don't have any experience with this so I won't be able to help you much with 
> it but afaik there are projects like gplin that try to simplify the process.

OK, for this task the printer has to be purchased :-)

Thanks for your answers.

Cheeers,

Melvin