Welcome to Gutenprint 5.3.0-pre1, an initial development release for 5.3. Please read these release notes carefully. Gutenprint is a suite of printer drivers for UNIX, Linux, and Macintosh OS X systems (10.6 and above) that use CUPS as their printing system. Gutenprint currently supports over 2800 printers. It also includes an enhanced Print plug-in for GIMP that replaces the print plug-in packaged with the GIMP distribution. *** NOTE TO PACKAGERS: Please read the file README.package for issues that are of interest to distributors and packagers of Gutenprint. It is not necessary for end users of Gutenprint to read this file. These release notes contain the following sections: I) General Requirements II) Changes from Previous Releases III) Exceptions and Workarounds A) General Issues B) Printer-Specific Issues C) Build/Installation Issues IV) Overall changes from Gutenprint 5.2.13 A) General User-visible Changes B) New Functionality C) Changes to the Enhanced Print plugin for GIMP D) Changes to the CUPS interface E) Architectural Changes V) Critical Upgrade Note from Gutenprint 5.0 or Earlier ================================================================ I) GENERAL REQUIREMENTS Gutenprint will run on any reasonably modern computer running Linux, Macintosh OS X (10.6 or above), Solaris, or any other UNIX-like operating system. If you plan to compile this package from source, you will also need an ANSI C compiler, such as gcc (recommended). A compiler is not required if you are installing a pre-compiled package. Processor and memory requirements vary depending upon the printer and runtime options selected; it is suggested that you have at least 64 MB of memory for general purpose printing, 256 MB or more for high quality printing on a good printer, and 1 GB or more for large format printing at high resolution. You should have at least 50 MB of free disk space to compile and install Gutenprint. Disk space requirements for printing will vary depending upon how you use Gutenprint, but are generally modest except as noted below. We recommend a processor speed of at least 300 MHz. Fast printers may require a faster processor to achieve maximum printing speed. For general use, you should have the Common UNIX Printing System, CUPS (version 1.1.15 or above). Please the rest of the release notes, in particular the Exceptions and Workarounds, for full details on installation, as there is important information to be aware of. CUPS is the printing system used on Macintosh OS X 10.3 and above, and many other systems use it. The combination of CUPS and Gutenprint provides a flexible, general purpose printing system capable of producing the highest quality output with any of the printers supported by this package. We strongly recommend using CUPS with Gutenprint as a general-purpose printing solution. The enhanced Print plug-in for GIMP requires GIMP 2.0 or above (GIMP 2.2 recommended). This plug-in will work with any printing system, and offers a comprehensive user interface to control all aspects of the printing process. If you are printing photographs in large format from GIMP at very high resolution, disk space requirements may be substantial, and we recommend at least 2 GB of free disk space for that purpose. Users of Macintosh 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and above can use this package. For ease of installation, a pre-built package with installer is normally supplied a few days after the release of the source package. We strongly recommend that OS X users use the pre-built package rather than attempt to build it themselves. Packages are not always supplied for development releases. The README file included with this package provides full instructions for building and installing Gutenprint. ================================================================ II) MAJOR CHANGES FROM PREVIOUS RELEASES * This is the initial 5.3 pre-release. Please refer to the release notes from Gutenprint 5.2.13 and the Overall Changes from 5.2.13 below. ================================================================ III) EXCEPTIONS AND WORKAROUNDS A) GENERAL ISSUES 1) The Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, and dye sublimation drivers do not offer all of the additional options and improvements that the Epson driver does. Please contact us if you would like to assist with making these options available (requires C programming skills). ---------------- B) PRINTER-SPECIFIC ISSUES 1) A number of Epson printers have been reported to produce poor quality at the bottom of the page in borderless mode when the resolution is set to 5760x2880 DPI. The specific problem observed is that the print fades at the bottom of the page. Other than reducing the resolution or avoiding use of borderless mode, there is no known workaround for this problem. 2) There have been reports of poor color fidelity on the Epson Stylus Photo R2880 with certain paper types. This problem has not been reproduced. 3) A number of laser printers capable of large format printing are incorrectly classified as small format, thereby not permitting users to select large paper sizes. The workaround is to use the printer named "Generic PCL 6/PCL XL LF Printer". Please report any such printers to gimp-print-devel@lists.sourceforge.net; they will be fixed in the next available release. 4) Color laser printers are currently supported only in black and white mode. At present, we do not have resources to add a color laser driver. If you have interest in this area and the requisite skills, please contact gimp-print-devel@lists.sourceforge.net. ---------------- C) BUILD/INSTALLATION ISSUES 1) With certain versions of CUPS and in certain non-default configurations, if a new version of Gutenprint is installed over an existing version genppd will create PPD files based on the older version of Gutenprint rather than the newer version. This will happen if all of the following are true: i) The cups-config provided by the CUPS driver adds -Wl,rpath=/usr/lib. This is done by some versions of CUPS reportedly because in some cases the runtime linker does not pick up libraries out of /usr/lib. This can be checked by running cups-config --libs --ldflags and inspecting the output for any mention of "rpath", "RPATH", "RUN_PATH", or the like. This is controlled by the CUPS installation on your system. ii) There is presently a version of Gutenprint installed in /usr (--prefix=/usr) rather than /usr/local or the like. The default location of Gutenprint installation is in /usr/local, but system vendors typically install Gutenprint in /usr. iii) Gutenprint is built dynamically only (--disable-static or --disable-static-genppd). This is not a default, and requires the explicit --disable-static or --disable-static-genppd on the Gutenprint "configure" command line. Therefore, if you build Gutenprint normally you should not be vulnerable to this problem. Note that in general if you install CUPS into a non-standard location, and install Gutenprint into the same location, this problem can surface. For example, if you choose to install CUPS in /usr/local and Gutenprint in /usr/local you are vulnerable to this. However, it is not standard practice to install CUPS anywhere but /usr. In this case, the run path embedded in the genppd executable points to the version of Gutenprint installed in /usr/lib. This run path overrides any attempt by libtool to look in the build directory. The result is that cups-genppd and rastertogutenprint are run against the older version of Gutenprint. If the new version contains additional features (more printers, changes to printer options, etc.) they will not be available. This bug is difficult to detect in a normal build. It normally does not cause an error to happen during build unless there is an API change from the version installed and the version being built; the only failure is frequently that some PPD files may not be built or may be built with missing options. Due to the PPD version checking introduced in this release, the behavior might manifest itself as a runtime error. It is also possible that there will be no error at all other than the older version of Gutenprint being used, with the result that new features and bug fixes are not available. If you wish to use only shared libraries, do not wish to build static libraries at all, and are vulnerable to this issue (because cups-config --ldflags sets the run path), there are three workarounds available: i) Build and install Gutenprint into /usr (rather than /usr/local) and then rebuild Gutenprint from scratch. This will install the correct libgutenprint.so in /usr/lib, and in the rebuild genppd will be run against the correct library. ii) Remove the old version of Gutenprint prior to building the new version of Gutenprint. The important files to remove are anything named /usr/lib/libgutenprint*. iii) Edit cups-config to remove the reference to the run path. 2) There is a known complication building "escputil" that causes problems on a small number of systems. "escputil" uses the "readline" package, to support command editing and history within the program. Unfortunately, linking programs with "readline" often requires linking against additional libraries, and the exact library depends upon the system (e. g. not all Linux/UNIX systems have the same requirements). The configure script attempts to determine which additional library must be linked against. It tries using the following libraries in this order to build a test executable: -lncurses -lcurses -ltermcap no additional libraries The reason it tries other libraries first is that some systems will link successfully, but only fail when an attempt is made to actually call readline. Therefore, we assume that additional libraries are required. Since we try the extra libraries in order from most recent to oldest, we expect that the first one we find will be appropriate. For example, if the "ncurses" library is the standard on a given system, the "termcap" library may be provided for back compatibility, but it is unlikely that "termcap" will be the standard with "curses" or "ncurses" being provided for compatibility only (so that the link will succeed but the command will use the incorrect library). As this procedure is not failsafe, we provide the following configure options to control this behavior: ./configure --with-readline=yes (the default; attempts to determine the correct library to link against) ./configure --with-readline=no (turns off use of readline altogether) ./configure --with-readline=only (specifically instructs configure to not attempt to link against any other libraries) ./configure --with-readline=libs (specifies the libraries to be linked against) A hypothetical (this won't work anywhere!) example of the latter would be ./configure --with-readline='-lncurses -ltermcap' Note that configure will not allow readline to be used if it cannot successfully build the test program, regardless of the option selected. If you are having difficulty getting escputil to build, we suggest using --with-readline=no. The commands used within escputil are very short and seldom require significant editing. ================================================================ IV) OVERALL CHANGES FROM 5.2.13 to 5.3 A) GENERAL USER-VISIBLE CHANGES 1) It is now possible to specify units in fractional point sizes, allowing more precise placements and page sizes. B) NEW FUNCTIONALITY 1) All units are now floating point rather than integer. C) CHANGES TO THE ENHANCED PRINT PLUGIN FOR GIMP 1) Units can be entered in fractional point sizes as well as Imperial and metric sizes that are not exact numbers of points. D) CHANGES TO THE CUPS INTERFACE 1) Units can be entered in fractional point sizes as well as Imperial and metric sizes that are not exact numbers of points. E) ARCHITECTURAL CHANGES 1) All units are now floating point rather than integer. ================================================================ V) CRITICAL UPGRADE NOTE FROM GUTENPRINT 5.0 OR EARLIER This note does not apply to initial installations of Gutenprint, upgrades from any 5.2 release, or to Macintosh users; if this describes you, you should skip this section. If you are using CUPS with Gutenprint on a non-Macintosh system, and are upgrading from Gimp-Print 4.2 or a version of Gutenprint prior to 5.2, please read this note carefully as there are special procedures that you should follow in addition to the normal procedure of running cups-genppdupdate. Background: older versions of Gutenprint distributed CUPS backends, named "epson" and "canon", that we have determined have compatibility problems on certain systems. The symptom of this problem is that the last page of each print job does not complete; it prints almost to the end of the page, and the printer stops. The only way to clear this condition is to power the printer off and back on after each job. A CUPS "backend" is a special program whose purpose is to transfer data from the printer driver to the printer itself. CUPS provides a number of general purpose backends. The "epson" and "canon" backends previously provided with Gutenprint are capable of retrieving ink level information from Epson and Canon inkjet printers respectively. These backends are no longer needed in CUPS 1.2, and are not strictly necessary in CUPS 1.1. Therefore, these backends have been removed from Gutenprint as of 5.2. Due to a subtle issue, these backends may not correctly send all of the data to the printer on some systems. While we have not fully characterized the systems on which this happens, it appears likely that it is on certain operating system versions. The backend believes that all data has been sent, but the way it does I/O results in some data not being sent on all systems. As a result, the printer continues to wait for more data to be received. We recommend that if you have any printer queues using these backends that you modify the queues to use a different backend. Even if you are not currently having problems, we recommend that you do this, as a future operating system upgrade may result in this problem becoming visible. If this is the first version of Gutenprint or Gimp-Print you have installed on your system, you should not have these backends present. Here are the steps we recommend that you follow. 1) Determine whether any printers on your system use the epson or canon backends. This can be determined via "lpstat -v". This may be done without administrator privileges: $ lpstat -v device for EPSON_Stylus_Photo_R300_USB_1: usb://EPSON/Stylus%20Photo%20R300 device for espr300-ez: usb://EPSON/Stylus%20Photo%20R300 device for r300-test: epson:/dev/usb/lp0 device for HP_LaserJet_1022_USB_1: usb://HP/LaserJet%201022 Inspect each device line for a device that begins with "epson:" or "canon:". These are the queues you must modify. In this case, the only queue that must be modified is "r300-test". The other queues all have devices that begin with "usb:"; these queues use the standard CUPS USB backend that does not have this problem. 2) For each queue that uses the epson or canon backend, modify it to use an appropriate backend. If your system provides a user interface for administering printers, we recommend that you use that interface. If you're comfortable with the KDE or GNOME print manager, you may use that interface. However, we recommend using the CUPS web interface (http://localhost:631/printers) to modify the printer. The steps you should follow (assuming that you are using the CUPS web interface) are: i) Click "Modify Printer", to start leading you through a series of screens allowing you to change the printer properties. ii) The first screen, entitled "Modify Printer r300-test" (the printer name, of course, will vary), will display the name of the printer, along with the location and description. You may modify these if you wish, but it isn't necessary. Click "Continue". iii) The next screen, entitled "Device for r300-test", is the important one. This provides you a drop-down list of devices. These devices typically include "AppSocket/HP JetDirect", "LP#1", and so forth. It is critical that you select the correct device at this point. The entries that you want are of the form EPSON Stylus Photo R300 USB #1 (EPSON Stylus Photo R300) or EPSON Stylus Photo EX Parallel #1 (EPSON Stylus Photo EX) Make sure to select the one that's appropriate for your printer model. You will likely also see entries such as "Gutenprint USB Printer #1 (EPSON USB2.0 Printer (Hi-speed)". These are the entries corresponding to the "epson" and "canon" backends, and you must avoid these. iv) The next screen, entitled "Make/Manufacturer for r300-test", allows you to select the manufacturer of the printer. Normally, the correct manufacturer (Epson or Canon) will be highlighted, and you can click Continue. v) The next screen, entitled "Model/Driver for r300-test", allows you to select the precise model of the printer. Normally, the correct model (which will be named something like "Epson Stylus Photo R300 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.3.0-pre1") will already be highlighted, and you can click "Modify Printer". Otherwise, you must find and select the correct printer model before clicking Modify Printer. You will likely need to provide your administrator username and password to continue here. After this, you should see a message "Printer r300-test modified successfully". 3) Remove the epson and canon backends. On most systems, the backends will be named /usr/lib/cups/backend/canon and /usr/lib/cups/backend/epson. On some systems, the backends will be named /usr/lib64/cups/backend/canon and /usr/lib64/cups/backend/epson. They may be present in other locations, but these are the most common locations. If these files are present, you should create a directory named /usr/lib/cups/old-backend or /usr/lib64/cups/old-backend, and move the epson and canon backends there just in case you later need them. % cd /usr/lib/cups % sudo mkdir old-backend Password: % cd backend % sudo mv canon epson ../old-backend Password: The specific underlying technical problem appears to be that when at least certain devices are in non-blocking mode (O_NONBLOCK or O_NDELAY) with certain operating system versions (Linux 2.6.25 appears to be suffer this problem, and most likely some other versions also do), the close() call does not result in all data being flushed to the device. We have determined that the data is in fact written by the "epson" process, but it's never getting to the printer.