#590 Inefficient movement of the printer head causing very slow printing.

[nvm]

-The printer is an Epson Stylus TX135.
-There is no official support for that printer so I am using the driver of TX125. Works fine.
-Using Gutenprint 5.3.3+cups

While printing, the printing head moves accross the entire rail on each pass, independent of the image width (as opposed to the manufacturer drivers).
That means if I print two images with the same height, but one of them has 1/100 of the width of the other, using the same settings, they will take the same amount of time to get printed.
Not only takes an unnusual large amount of time to print small images, but also will wear the mechanism way sooner than expected.
I hope that, head movement limited to the length of the image is possible to implement and I'm available to test anything in case a dev wants to do this.

Sidenote: The software is great and I love the amount of tunning available. Thank you!

[Robert Krawitz]

I haven't seen this with other printers, but there are a lot of possibilities here.

Is it possible for you to print with the Gutenprint plugin for GIMP? That generates the print data directly and is easier to to use to narrow down problems like this.

[nvm]

Not sure I understood your question correctly.

I'm using the driver that comes by default with Lubuntu labeled "Epson Stylus TX125 - Cups+Gutenprint v5.3.3" but I'm not really using it over network.
The printer is connected directly to the machine over usb and printing is already being done through gimp.

[nvm]

Sorry for replying again so soon but I wanted to give more details about the printing results.
Given some of the things detailed below, I am not certain if would be better to submit a request to add a new printer.

While the printing comes out satisfactory, looking closely it is possible to see a good amount of speckling around the area of the pictures. Sometimes, there is so much that seems it was part of the source image. The speckling is present even outside of the Y axis of the picture, where at that point, the job should have been finished.
Also, looks like the printer is having a hard time printing vertical straight lines (perpendicular to the printer head movement). I know there is some factors to consider like the weaving pattern, bi or unidirectional printing etc. You can see what is being referred to in the images bellow.
The printer head is clean and I did the calibration under Windows since the manufacturer driver for Linux do not offer the option.
At first I thought it was the result of aging hardware, but none of these characteristics are present using the manufacturer drivers (be it under Linux or Windows).
I would very much prefer to use Gutenprint over the Epson drivers considering that it can get closer to what I am trying to achieve despite those problems.
Again, everything is being printed from Gimp. Here is the pictures:
img01 - Speckling in an empty area where the head should not have moved to while printing.
img02 - Speckling in the Y axis where the image and print should have ended.
img03 - Black lines that have some very undulated and disjointed areas. Speckling. (mostly at the top)

[Robert Krawitz]

It's hard for me to see what's on the image.

Do you have a "Print with Gutenprint" option in the File menu in GIMP? If so, could you use that?

[nvm]

Oh... I do not have.
I spent a lot of time trying to build the plugin but couldn't get all dependencies. Unfortunately could barely compile Gimp.

[nvm]

Good news. I got the plugin. I can print using it and can say, after double checking, that the printer head behaves as it should with the plugin.
The printer head runs only accross the picture lenght and the print quality is noticeably better than using gutenprint directly.
(selected the TX125 on the plugin)

Sorry for not reporting this sooner. I ran out of ink and was only able to buy it and test today.
I got the plugin installing the gimp-gutenprint package. For some reason I thought the only way of installing the plugin was compiling the gutenprint driver with it. My bad.

What else can I do to help troubleshoot this?

[nvm]

Just to make clear, as I may have not expressed clearly on my last message:
It is great that using the plugin, both printer head movement and quality are as expected.
I wouldn't mind to continue printing with the gutenprint plugin. But I still need the color and dot size tuning that is available on the driver.
Is there a way to have those tuning options of the driver on the plugin, or implement the plugin head movement and printing quality on the driver itself?

---

EDIT:
Disregard the above.
Looking at the manual I saw an update that added the options I needed but wasn't seeing in the plugin as they are not present in the main tab along with the other ones. Now I found them.

From now on, I will use the plugin instead of the driver alone.
Still, would be great if the driver supported this printer model with the proper head movement and the quality that the plugin provides.

Thanks =)