Re: An Idea...

[Robert L Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu>]

I'm jumping into the middle of this, but...

   Resent-Cc: "recipient.list.not.shown":;
   Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 09:48:50 -0600
   From: Kent Schumacher <kent@structural-wood.com>

   Wolfgang Sourdeau wrote:

   > For what the drivers are concerned, I still think ghostscript should be
   > used for the non-postscript printers. As it includes already a lot of
   > good drivers, the missing features such as "econofast" could easily be
   > added to the existing drivers. For example the Epson Stylus driver in gs
   > contains code to manage "MicroWeave technology" of those printers...
   > Ghostscript is GNU software and so it could and should be enhanced in
   > the same philosophy.

Ghostscript has some disadvantages, though:

1) The output drivers must be compiled in -- they cannot be
   dynamically loaded or run as plugins.

2) There's no good way to query what particular options a particular
   device supports.

I've been maintaining the Gimp's Print plugin for the past several
months.  I've been moving all of the Gimp-specific code out of the
engine and print drivers per se, with the intent of writing a
Ghostscript or CUPS driver around this (the output quality is much
higher than that of the Ghostscript driver for the Epson Stylus Photo
printers, and  I'm told for others as well).

   I'm starting to feel preachy, and I think that it is because I am
   nervous that we are heading toward every application or set of
   applications needing a print configuration utility (which is what
   we have now, and it is a nightmare to administer).

Agreed; from my point of view, trying to retrofit the Gimp print
plugin into other applications would be just plain foolish.

Given that my hacking time is fairly limited (most of what there is
goes into improving the print quality, and supporting some of the
newer Epson printers is planned to be my next project), what can I do,
as the maintainer of the Gimp print plugin, to help out here?

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>      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 lpf@uunet.uu.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton