[Gimp-print-devel] Printing stuff

[Robert L K. <rl...@al...>]

I came across your site today.  I haven't had a chance to take a look
at much of anything yet, but it looks interesting in light of a
project I'm working on.

I am currently leading a project to enhance the Print plugin for the
Gimp called, naturally enough, gimp-print.  We're using SourceForge to
host our project.  We currently have nine developers signed up, and
we're working on a variety of things.  The plugin was originally
written by Mike Sweet of Easy Software (easysw.com), who brought it up
to release 2.0; I did the 3.0 release myself, and our team is working
on the 3.1 development branch leading up to a 3.2 stable release.  The
Gimp 1.2 will probably have the current stable release (3.0.5).

Currently this plugin consists of a GUI, a variety of printer drivers
(for Postscript, and a variety of Epson, HP, and just recently added
Canon inkjets), and a selection of dithering engines.  In 3.0, I
started work on separating the front end GUI from the drivers and
dithering engine, with the intention of eventually making the Print
plugin be a thin glue layer between the Gimp and a more general
Linux/Unix printing system.  Henryk Richter wrote a prototype
GhostScript driver for Epson Stylus printers based on this. work.

We're continuing along these lines in 3.1.  Henryk's prototype
identified some problems with 3.0 that we've been fixing along the
way.  It's quite clear that the drivers, rendering engine, and even
the GUI don't belong in the Gimp; they belong in a driver layer, and
it's also clear that the user interface cannot be entirely
printer-independent, since different printers have different
capabilities that must be presented to the user.

Anyway, if you'd like to check out what we're up to, please visit our
home page at http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net.  We don't have a
3.1-based release just yet, because we've been concentrating a lot on
infrastructure and haven't yet gotten around to stabilizing things
enough to merit a real development release yet.  However, we'd
certainly like to share ideas and code (we're GPL) with anyone else
working on improving the printing situation.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rl...@al...>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lp...@uu...
Project lead for The Gimp Print --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton