Re: [Gimp-print-devel] Canon Pro9500 Mark II not printing

[Protea W. J. <aik...@gm...>]

Hello John,
Thank you for the report on the Canon PIXMA Pro 9500 Mark II.
Your second message gives more information, so I think I can say you have
run up against the limitations of the current gutenprint driver.
However, there are some things that can be done, more below.
For now, printing photos from the Win10 virtual machine is the best
solution.

On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 2:02 AM John Wilkes <jo...@wi...> wrote:

> The gutenprint 5.3.3 documentation on sourceforge says that ppd files are
> normally stored in /usr/share/cups/model/gutenprint but that directory does
> not exist on my system; /usr/share/cups/model is empty.
>
> In /etc/cups/ppd/Pro9500II-series.ppd I see:
> *StpPPDLocation:
> "/usr/share/cups/model/gutenprint/5.3/C/ppd/stp-bjc-Pro9500mk2-series.5.3.ppd"
>
> I can print with gimp-gutenprint, but only if I set it to "plain paper",
> and then it prints a washed out image very quickly instead of rich colors
> printed slowly.  Nothing prints if the paper type is set to anything else.
>

I cannot comment on the installation you have, but on my linux system the
files exist in a different directory:
/usr/share/cups/model/gutenprint/5.3/Global/stp-bjc-Pro9500mk2-series.5.3.ppd.gz
If a printer is actually configured, the relevant PPD file should then be
available under /etc/cups/ppd/ with the queuename as the name, and ppd as
the extension. It could be there is a problem with your distribution's
package, sorry I cannot say for sure.

Given that, I cannot say whether the printing you are obtaining is actually
using the driver you expect it to use.
The best way to check would be to enable debugging in the CUPS logging,
probably easiest from accessing the web CUPS admin at https://localhost:631
in your browser. Hopefully that works on your system. You will likely also
need to increase the log file length, to something like a million bytes or
more, I think the default length before truncation occurs is set far too
low.
Then one can see what CUPS is doing with the printjobs (including the test
job by the way), whether gutenprint is being used at all, and if so, what
printer and printer options are being set in each of your printing cases.

dpkg says I have the following installed:
>
> ii  gimp-gutenprint                                  5.3.3-4
> ii  gutenprint-locales                               5.3.3-4
> ii  libgutenprint-common                             5.3.3-4
> ii  libgutenprint9                                   5.3.3-4
> ii  libgutenprintui2-2                               5.3.3-4
> ii  printer-driver-gutenprint                        5.3.3-4
>
> Am I missing a package?
>
> Should my system have a /usr/share/cups/model/gutenprint folder?
>
> Is gutenprint not installed properly?
>

All that said, from the printing results, assuming they are actually using
the relevant gutenprint PPD, it would seem that the printer works "to spec"
for the current gutenprint capabilities.

There are two main problems.

First, there is only support for CMYK and photo CMYK colours. The Pro
series uses several others colours, such as grey, orange, green, and none
of these are supported. That means that any media types, or resolution
modes for particular media types, that require unsupported inks, simply
cannot be used. For the Pro9500 Mark II, that leaves only a few resolution
modes for plain media supported in gutenprint.
There is nothing a user can do to improve the situation here, unfortunately
(developer help is always welcome of course).

Second, for the modes that are supported, there is no calibration. That
means that the default  colour intensity, due, and saturation model is used
for virtually all printers, and this will in general give totally
unacceptable results for photo printing, although it is in most cases
suitable for text and perhaps even business graphics.
Here there is something users can help with: experimentation with
intensity, hue, and saturation, to allow us to provide a printer-specific
calibration matrix (and in general also media-specific and perhaps even
resolution-mode specific matrices) for the printer. This does take time,
effort, and costs ink, so there has not been much progress on this for most
printers. If you are interested, please contact me off-list.

Best regards,
Gernot Hassenpflug

On 10/16/20 2:46 PM, John Wilkes wrote:
> > When I try to print a photo from gimp, data is transmitted to the
> printer but nothing prints.  I see the blue light on the printer flash for
> a while, then it goes solid and the printer is idle.  I see the file in the
> print queue, and the print queue is empty after the blue light stops
> flashing.  I can print a test page from the gnome printer settings, just
> not from gimp.
> >
> > Pop!_OS 20.04  (System76 Ubuntu derivative)
> > gimp 2.10.18
> > gimp-gutenprint installed
> >
> > I am able to print photos from a Win10 virtual machine, but that is a
> clumsy workaround because files to be printed must be transferred to the VM.
> >
>
> --
> John Wilkes
> jo...@wi...
>
> A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people
> may take away the rights of the other 49.
>
>
>
>
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