[Gimp-print-devel] GS6.21 + gimp-print 3.1.4 + STC900 : floating point exception

[Ron v. O. <R.A...@Wb...>]

Hi all,

I've recently started testing gs+gimp-print with my STC900.
I use this printer mainly to print reports, letters etc. produced with
latex and dvips.  

Unfortunately there are no good, free drivers available for this
printer:
GS supports a general Epson printer (slow and medium quality)
CUPS only provides a medium quality, medium speed driver for a general
Epson printer,
SWPRINT has a fine driver, but this software isn't free.

So, I decided to try gimp-print.
The 1st experiments with gs6.21 + gimp-print3.1.3 were promising:
   Fine print quality, in text, graphics and photos albeit with low
saturation.
However the driver is slow.

The STC900 is a fast printer and with windows I use the 360dpi output
often for preview.
The windows driver requires approx 20 headmovements and 10 seconds to
print a page, gimp-print requires approx 40 movements and 50!! seconds
to print a page.

It would be nice if the low resolution settings of gimp-print were
faster, perhaps with lower quality.  The high resolution settings should
provide the best quality, perhaps with lower speed.

Robert informed me that the latest CVS-version provides better
saturation so I decided to try that one:
gs6.21 + gimp-print 3.1.4

gs -sDEVICE=stp -dMODEL=13 -dQuality=0 -sOutputFile=tiger.prn tiger.ps 

Floating point exception

I traced the problem to gdevstp-dither.c: dither_set_ink_spread(void
*vd, int spread).
The division at the end of the routine performs a division by 0.

I hope someone on this list can use this information to fix the problem.
Best regards,

Ron van Ostayen
 
R.A...@Wb...
Laboratory of Tribology
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Technology Delft