[Gimp-print-devel] What direction should we be headed?

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

I want to take a look at the direction in which we're headed.  I'm not
saying anything's wrong, per se, I just want to see where we fit in
with all the other free printing projects.

To the best of my knowledge, we're the only free printing system that
currently fully supports "photo-quality" (defined as variable dot size
and/or 6+ color inks) printers.  Ghostscript, via Uniprint, supports
most of the Epson printers, but I don't believe that the Uniprint
driver handles variable dot sizes.  There's an separate Photo 700/EX
driver I've seen for Ghostscript, but the output quality leaves quite
a lot to be desired (Regis sent me a sample from it).

However, I don't believe that we necessarily have the best rendering
technology.  I haven't seen rinkj output yet, but I've heard more than
enough good things about it.  There are some fancy rendering schemes
in various Ghostscript drivers (including that 700 driver I mentioned
above), although since I haven't seen their output I don't know how
good they are.

In other directions, GNOME (and presumably KDE) are moving ahead with
print projects.  These are intended to be more comprehensive solutions
to the general problem of printing under Linux (and other Unix
systems).  Chema can tell us more about Gnome-Print.  We should also
contact the KDE people to find out what they're up to.  There's also
PDQ, which doesn't try to address printer issues per se, but simply
tries to provide a general interface.

So that basically leaves us focusing on Gimp-specific issues, and on
high quality, low cost printers (particularly Epson right now,
although hopefully we'll have some luck with other vendors).  Cheap,
good printers is an interesting place to be, since these printers are
important for the desktop.

We're obviously not providing a complete soup-to-nuts printing
solution right now.  I don't think that that's necessarily what we
should be doing; we don't have the resources to do that, and GNOME and
KDE may be better placed to do that.  But it does leave me thinking
about where we should go from here.  What do other people think?
Should we move more toward supplying rendering for high end devices as
GNOME and KDE's print projects come on line, or should we be doing
something else?

-- 
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