Re: [Gimp-print-devel] Ghostscript driver

[Andy T. <And...@Ph...>]

On Sat, 20 May 2000 sh...@al... wrote:

> <gripe>
> Andy, is it really necessary to send HTML to the mailing list when plain
> text will do fine?  I find it really annoying when mh spawns lynx to read
> a web page that's been mailed to me and there's nothing but text on it.
> </gripe>

Sorry, happened unintentionally, I'll try to turn it off... 

> > I've looked over the ghostscript driver part in order to see how the canon
> > driver could be added. The gs driver uses the option "Model" being an integer
> > value. How about changing this to string and check it against printers->drive
> > r
> > (which is unique for any printer model as I get it).
> 
> I've been thinking about this and I'm not sure that that's the best way to
> go.

But you still need a method to pass options to the ghostscript driver.
An integer value for the printer model is in no way sufficient so this has
to be changed.

> What I think should be done is to write a simple shell script which can
> parse the user's saved printer configuration and call ghostscript with
> the appropriate options.  This shell script can be used as an input
> filter in the printcap file. Whether the options are numerical or string
> is largely irrelevant then, since the user would not need to see them.

The ghostscript uniprint driver uses those .upp files - I cannot judge at
the moment if this would be an applicaple way to set the driver options
but perhaps it'b be an alternative. Those files could do the finetuning
for a certain combination of printer model, resolution and output media.
Of course this would lead to many many such files but I don't really see
any other chance with ghostscript (especially when used from apsfilter or
alike).

> In addition to this, we would probably also need a standalone GUI/ncurses/
> commandline printer configurator, for those people who don't want to run
> the Gimp/X11/interactively, but that doesn't sound that hard to do.

Shouldn't we leave this to the distributors? SuSE comes with a more or
less nice printer configuration tool and AFAIK RedHat has one too.

Of course my last two remarks don't aply if you meant the case where you
call gs from the commandline (or any GUI watever) and send raw printer
data to the spooling system. This would have the same implications as
mentioned previously on this list however. All this lpd/gs stuff
with its stupid lack of passing options really sucks, always did so, but
it's spread too far so we have to find a smooth solution...

> Unfortunately, I have no time for the next two weeks.

two months in my case ;-)

Andy.