RE: [Gimp-print-devel] Tests with Stylus 640

[<sh...@al...>]

>      Use the unprinter to sanity check the changes you make.  A lot of the
>      bugs we`ve been finding can be caught that way.
>
> That`s a good point (although I haven`t been able to get it to work --
> it seems to want to eat all of my memory, and considering that I have
> 256 MB each of RAM and swap that`s quite a lot).

Really?  I'm working exclusively on my laptop at the moment.  I've got
96MB of physical RAM and I think 64 of swap.  I haven't had any such problems.

I wrote it with the intention of trying to be as memory tight as possible,
since, it will require a lot of RAM for large images.  If you're printing
an 8.5"x11" image at 1440x720 DPI with variable dot size, you will need a
few truckloads of bits, but for smaller prints it should work fine.  RAM
usage should scale roughly linearly with printed area.

I can see basically three possibilities:

   1)  You're printing a huge image.
   2)  There's a bug in unprint, causing it to think you're printing
       a huge image.  (possibly even a HUGE image)  (I've fixed several
       such bugs already)
   3)  There's a bug in gimp-print, causing it to produce bad ESCP2, which
       results in a huge image.

Can you post a URL to what you were trying to unprint that caused the memory
shortage?  Either the original or the ESCP2 file.  Actually the latter may
be preferable.

If it's really desirable to unprint very large images, I can recode this
to use even less RAM, but, it would either need to read through the file
at least twice (making it hard to use in a pipe) or have command line
switches that set the dimensions and positions in advance.

Eric