On 01-Jul-05 Chris Green wrote:
On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 01:27:44PM +0100, Adam Bower wrote:
On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 01:21:16PM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
I have my printer drivers installed in CUPS and everything else uses those by selecting printer Oj for the Officejet and Lj for the Laserjet. Gimp seems to send postscript to the printer even though I selected one of my CUPS printers, that's a bit brain dead. The Gimp doesn't seem to have drivers for my (pretty standard) HP printers.
What printers? (model numbers please) and which distro? Printing can be "fun" sometimes so there is an element of stabbing in the dark with the info you gave us so far :)
Slackware 10.1 with CUPS.
Printers are an HP7310 and an HP1060 (I think). I have the HPLIP drivers installed for the printers and they work well in general. I can print with no problems from firefox for example, it's just that I'm having trouble getting these .GIF and .JPG files to print so they look sensible on an A4 sheet of paper.
That was the whole point of my suggestion of using 'groff'. Chris said "that really does seem a bit OTT just to print soemthing!", but the point is that he wants it to "look sensible", and when you do it the 'groff' way you have total control over size, position, etc., once you have the graphic as an EPS (".eps") file, since enxapsulated within this is the "%%BoundingBox" line which defines the extent of the graphic in PS coordinates.
All you need is that your system somehow correctly prints PostScript files (I ensure this myself by having only PS-capable printers; otherwise you have to set up filters or "drivers" for whatever printer you have).
The discussion points by Chris and others indicate clearly just how elusive and problematic it can be to "tune" the printed output using the controls available in programs such as ImageMagick, Gimp, etc. -- or, indeed, get it to work at all!
Indeed, ImageMagick's 'display' program seems to offer you no options at all to control how the image you are displaying gets printed -- it simply "prints to a PostScript printer".
The Gimp's print-dialogue however does offer a good range of tuneable options, including choice of printer if yours in on the list (so I would choose "PostScript Level 2"). If the worst comes to the worst, you can also choose to print to file and then cope with sending this file to the printer by some other mechanism, if doing it directly from the Gimp does not work.
The Gimp's "Preview" does show how the graphic will appear on the A4 sheet, provided "A4" has been selected as "Media Size", so you should be able to choose the other parameters according to taste. All in all, the Gimp probably offers the most flexible "point & click" approach, provided you can overcome any problems of talking to the printer!
Best wishes, Ted.
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