Re: [hpoj-devel] fixed xsane crash, working on OJ LX/300 support

[Joe P. <joe...@sn...>]

On Sunday 05 May 2002 07:12 pm, David Paschal wrote:
> Joe Piolunek wrote:
> > Copy quality: The colors in the copy are lighter than in the original. In 
the
> > 	tests I did, the printed area appeared higher on the page than in the
> > 	original copy (about 13 mm. closer to the top).
> Did it help to use xsane's brightness/contrast controls?

After clicking xsane's autoadjust button, the copy is noticably, but not a 
lot lighter than the original. It's difficult to get the xsane color settings 
right because the copy seems to be printed lighter than the preview image. 
When I reduced only the gamma setting, the color match between original and 
copy improved, but the colors seemed duller, as if too much black had been 
used. After a few tries, I haven't been able to match the colors in a way 
that I would call 'very good'. I suppose it could possibly be a postscript 
conversion or hpijs issue (I'm using ghostscript-6.51-16, hpijs-1.0.3). 


> > The part of the process that *seems* longest is when nothing appears to
> > be happening. A seeming lack of activity should be avoided, IMHO. The
> > wait would seem a lot easier if the progress bar's behavior were changed
> > so that it either moves slowly, finishing as the print begins, or even
> > better (IMO), the progress bar moves faster, but restarts for each
> > part of the > process, accompanied by an informational text message.

> Unfortunately, I don't think there's much that can be done about this delay
> unless the ghostscript+hpijs step can somehow be made faster.  I don't know
> how long it takes xsane to generate a PostScript version of the scanned
> image.  I do know that there can be a long delay from the time the
> PostScript file gets to the print spooler to the time the page is done
> printing, and during that time xsane has no visibility on the status of
> that operation in order to display a realistic progress bar.

If a progress bar isn't feasible, could an informational text message be 
presented?  I think users would be more inclined to wait if they see some 
indication that the task will (probably) eventually finish.
 
> One possible solution would be to write a command-line application that
> uses scanimage to scan the page(s), either calls hpijs directly (bypassing
> the time-consuming PostScript conversion steps) or links directly with
> the DJ6xx driver code, and sends the resulting output through libptal to
> the printer.  It would really only need to support color copying on the
> DJ6xx-based models, because other models can handle standalone color
> copying and all models can handle standalone black&white copying.
> However, I won't be able to attempt this any time soon.

Bypassing the conversion steps would seem to be the ultimate solution, if it 
could be implemented. The 600's usability under Linux is already pretty good. 
I think people will like the next hpoj release.  

-- 
Joe