[Gimp-print-devel] Re: Printing

[Miguel de I. <mi...@he...>]

> I noticed in your Slashdot interview that you said that one of GNOME's
> greatest needs is for more printer drivers for gnome-print.  Well, in
> the gimp-print project (the Gimp Print plugin, which a group of us
> have split off as its own separate project from the Gimp) we have a
> fair number of print drivers, mostly for Epson but also some HP and
> Canon printers.  We also have a dithering engine that works fairly
> well that supports all this stuff.

That sounds slick!  So time to merge those printers I would say.

Basically gnome-print has a postscript imaging model, and we can
provide the drivers with an RGB buffer to dump into the printer.  So
my guess is that we want to do this

> Personally, I think that having a heavyweight standalone print plugin
> for the Gimp is exactly the wrong direction to go, and indeed one of
> our goals is to eventually get rid of the plugin except as a thin glue
> layer.

Sounds good.

> One area that we really want to look at is how to specify
> printer-specific options.  There are a lot of these (e. g. different
> ways of producing output, different paper types, etc.) and we need a
> framework for all of this to fit into.

Yes, I agree.  And we do not have this yet.  But it needs to talk to
the various printing backends that people have done (VA stuff provides
access to the database of features available on a printer)

> If you'd like to check out what we have on gimp-print.sourceforge.net,
> please feel free to do so.  It's all (of course :-) ) GPL'ed.

Mhm.  Currently gnome-print is LGPL.  This might be a serious problem.

Miguel.