[Gimp-print-announce] ANNOUNCE: Gutenprint 5.0.0-beta3

[Tyler B. <ty...@us...>]

Welcome to Gutenprint 5.0.0-beta3!  Please read these release notes
carefully.

Gutenprint, formerly named Gimp-Print, is a suite of printer drivers
that may be used with most common UNIX print spooling systems,
including CUPS, lpr, LPRng, or others.  These drivers provide high
quality printing for UNIX (including Macintosh OS X 10.2 and 10.3) and
Linux systems that in many cases equal or exceed proprietary
vendor-supplied drivers in quality and functionality, and can be used
for demanding printing tasks requiring flexibility and high quality.
This software package includes the Print plug-in for the GIMP and
Ghostscript and CUPS drivers, as well as Foomatic data.

The package has been renamed in order to clearly distinguish it from
the GIMP.  While this package started out as the Print plugin for the
GIMP, it has expanded into a collection of general purpose printer
drivers, and the Print plugin for the GIMP is now only a small (but
important) piece of the package.  Furthermore, the name Gutenprint
recognizes Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable type
printing press.  Finally, the word "guten" means "good" in German.

Gutenprint 5.0.0-beta3 is the third beta prerelease of Gutenprint 5.0.
It is based on the Gimp-Print 4.3 series that has been in development
for over two years, and includes many improvements over the very
popular 4.2 series.  This release is not considered to be a fully
stable release (there are still various things in flux, and it has not
undergone the extensive testing that is required to declare a release
stable), but we've been using it and we believe that it will be useful
for many purposes.

Gutenprint currently contains over 200 drivers supporting in excess of
600 printer models.

The Print plug-in for the GIMP requires the GIMP 1.2.3 or above on the
1.2 line, or the GIMP 2.0 or 2.1.  You may need to install packages
named "gimp-devel", "gtk-devel", and "glib-devel" (or similar
equivalents) on many systems.  This plug-in will work with any
printing system, and offers a comprehensive user interface to control
all aspects of the printing process.

The CUPS driver requires CUPS 1.1.15 or higher.  You may need to
install a package named "cups-devel" or similar on many systems.
Please the rest of the release notes, in particular the Exceptions and
Workarounds, for full details on installation, as there is an
important caveat.  CUPS is the printing system used on Macintosh OS X
10.2 and above, and many other systems use it.  The combination of
CUPS and Gutenprint provides a flexible, general purpose printing
system capable of producing the highest quality output with any of the
printers supported by this package.  We strongly recommend using CUPS
with Gutenprint as a general-purpose printing solution.

The Ghostscript driver requires GNU Ghostscript 6.53 or higher, ESP
Ghostscript 7.05 or higher, or AFPL Ghostscript 7.04 or higher.  It
uses the IJS package included with these versions of Ghostscript to
create a driver that may be built much more easily than traditional
Ghostscript drivers.  The options for this driver are very complex,
and it is normally used with the Foomatic driver integration system.

Users of Macintosh OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and 10.3 (Panther) can use this
package, as the printing system is based on CUPS.  For ease of
installation, a pre-built package with installer is normally supplied
a few days after the release of the source package.  We highly
recommend that OS X users use the pre-built package rather than
attempt to build it themselves.

NOTE: This package will not work with any version of OS X 10.0 and
10.1 (such as 10.1.5), as those systems do not use CUPS as their
printing system.  This is NOT going to be fixed; you must upgrade to
at least OS X 10.2 in order to use this package.  The reason why is
that OS X 10.2 and above use CUPS as the basis of the printing system.
OS X 10.0 and 10.1 use a different system that would require a
separate driver, and we do not plan to write that driver.

The README file included with this package provides full instructions
on building and installing Gutenprint.

These release notes contain the following sections:

1) Changes from 5.0.0-beta2 to 5.0.0-beta3

Please see the `NEWS' file included with the software for information
regarding previous releases.
================================================================

* Major changes between Gimp-Print 5.0.0 beta 2 and Gutenprint 5.0.0 
beta 3:

   1) The package has been renamed Gutenprint, and library and header
      file names have been changed accordingly.  All programs using
      Gutenprint will need to be changed appropriately.

   2) The package now compiles on all GIMP 2.x releases, such as 2.0
      and 2.2.

   3) The GIMP plugin (both 1.2 and 2.x) now offers a copy count
      option, to permit printing multiple copies of an image as a
      single operation.

   4) The Canon Selphy CP-400 and CP-500 are now supported.

   5) Unitone and Hybrid Unitone dithering have been disabled in this
      release due to some output problems that have been discovered.
      We recommend use of EvenTone or Hybrid EvenTone dithering instead.

   6) Color correction has been tweaked to improve tonality and hue.

   7) Shared libraries now build correctly on AIX.

   8) The Print plugin for the GIMP now handles unnamed images
      correctly.

   9) Various minor compilation problems have been fixed.

   10) The Epson Stylus C65 and C66 has been retuned to improve quality
      at 720x360 DPI.  On these printers, the 720x360 DPI mode produces
      significantly better output quality than on most other printers.

      At present, we do not know whether the C63 and C64 require the
      same tunings as the C65 and C66.  We would appreciate people
      trying both the C64 and C66 drivers with this printer and
      reporting to us which driver produces better output.

   11) Various minor build problems have been resolved.