No, it can be used for many printing needs. Gimp-print started out as a driver for The Gimp, the well known image manipulation program. Early in development versions for Ghostscript and later CUPS were added. The emphasis is still on quality color printing, though performance gets a lot of attention these days.
Photo mode does a lot of work to make colors as similar to screen presentation as possible. This takes time. Line art is faster, but colors may be off. Solid Colors is somewhere in between. B/W mode does not use color ink when printing, and is much faster.
Please check your printing system (lpd, CUPS, LPRng, etc.) configuration. You may also have a problem with your parallel port or USB connection, so take a look at /var/log/messages (or wherever your system logs are kept).
Many Epson printers (in particular) do this if they encounter an error in the command stream. This usually indicates a bug in Gutenprint; please report it to gimp-print-devel@sourceforge.net or via the bug tracking system at http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net. Make sure you report the printer you have and all of the settings that you used. But first, triple check that you're using the right printer model!
This usually indicates a bug in the package. Please report it as described above. Also as described above, make sure you've set the right printer.
Printers for which support just has been added may not have been tested, as the developers do not have access to the printer. It is worth trying different settings. For example, change the resolution to a mainstream value as used on that printer. Also photo mode is better tested than the optimized versions. When you find out what works and what doesn't, file a bug report.
One common cause of this is not using "raw" mode when printing from the Gimp plugin. Depending upon your printing system, you will need to use either -l (traditional BSD lpd), -oraw (CUPS lpr), or -d (most versions of System V lp, including CUPS). Otherwise the printing system attempts to interpret the output as something else, and tries to apply a filter to it to convert it to something else (usually PostScript).
Another less common cause of this (it usually causes other symptoms, like printing only part of a page) is lack of space somewhere. This is most commonly an issue when using the Gimp Print plugin. The plugin creates a huge temporary file that gets sent to the printing system. The size of the file varies; it's proportional to the page size and the resolution setting chosen. Full-page, high resolution photographs can result in 100 MB of output. The system may need to have 2 or 3 copies of this file for short periods of time. If your /tmp, /var, or wherever your spooler keeps its temporary files is too small, you'll have problems.
Finally, problems with your parallel or USB port may be the cause of problems here. Certain Epson printers in particular are known to be very sensitive to the quality of connecting cables, and may have trouble with long or low quality cables, or USB hubs. If nothing else works, and you're certain you've tried everything else, try a better cable or a direct USB connection.
HP had sold two printers with the 1200 model designation. The old version is 300 DPI and has a heating element to dry the ink. It was manufactured around 1990. The new version is of 2000 vintage and has higher resolution. The one supported by this package is the new one???
Try selecting a different resolution or quality setting. Especially lower resolutions have a problem putting enough ink on paper. Also, use Photo mode. If you find settings that do not work at all (you get garbage or no output, but other settings work), report these as bugs. High resolutions should produce a similar (but smoother) result than medium resolutions. Resolutions under a certain printer dependent figure are seen as draft-only - for example lower than 360 DPI on Epsons with standard paper or lower than 300 DPI on HP.
Also make sure that you have the right kind of paper selected. Selecting plain paper when you're printing on high quality photo paper is certain to result in a light, grainy image. Selecting photo paper when you're printing on plain paper will result in a dark, muddy image that bleeds through the paper. There are differences between different kinds of paper; you may need to tweak the density and color settings slightly.
In addition, certain printers don't work well on certain kinds of paper. Epson printers work well on Epson papers, but don't work well on many third party papers (particularly the high quality photo papers made by other vendors). This isn't a conspiracy to lock you into their paper, it's because they've formulated the paper and ink to work well together.
If you use Ghostscript, make sure the Ghostscript resolution is not set higher than the driver resolution. If it is higher, the driver has to throw away part of the pixels, leading to uneven strokes in text and slanted lines with interruptions.
Please see src/ghost/README for more information.
% escputil -r /dev/lp0 -i [ ... license info omitted ... ] Cannot read from /dev/lp0: Invalid argument
You need to rebuild your kernel with CONFIG_PRINTER_READBACK enabled.
The classic test of printer connectivity -- sending an ASCII file to it -- doesn't work on many Epson printers out of the box (or after printing from Windows or Macintosh). Epson printers from the Stylus Color 740 and newer use a special "packet mode" in which they do not recognize standard commands or ASCII text. They must be sent a special sequence that takes them out of packet mode. The command
escputil -u -s -r /dev/lp0
will take the printer out of packet mode and enable you to print to it. Of course, as soon as you've read back status from the printer, you know it's working (although if you're unable to read status out of the printer, you might have a different problem; see above).
Printing to your printer from Gutenprint, whether you use the Print plugin, the CUPS driver, or the Ghostscript driver, will also take the printer out of packet mode. But then again, if you successfully print to your printer, you know it's working, so why worry? If you're trying to test your spooler, though, the escputil trick above will do it. Just make sure that /dev/lp0 is the right device; if it isn't, substitute whatever is.
Note: this does not apply to printers prior to the 740 (such as the Stylus Photo EX, Stylus Color 850, or anything even older). Those printers are always capable of printing ASCII text, and don't have packet mode. You can read status from them, but you must leave off the '-u' option.
By default, the BSD device driver for the USB printer device (usually ulpt0) does a prime, or USB bus reset, when the device is opened. This causes the printer to reset itself (one can hear the print head moving back and forth when this happens) and lose sync. After this the printer won't go into graphics mode and instead spews characters all over you expensive photo paper. This has been observed on the Stylus Photo 870; it likely exists with other USB-connected Epson Stylus printers.
The fix is to use the "unlpt0" device instead of "ulpt0". The driver doesn't perform the USB prime when unlpt is opened. If this device doesn't exist on your system you can create it with
mknod unlpt0 c 113 64 root wheel
in the /dev directory.
If you use CUPS, and your prints from StarOffice come out incorrectly (particularly at low resolution), try the following. This assumes a network installation of StarOffice 5.2.
# cd /etc/cups/ppd # for f in * ; do > ln -s $f `echo $f | sed 's/ppd$/PS/'` > done
Following this, restart spadmin and click on Install New Driver. When you select your CUPS PPD directory, you will find the necessary drivers listed.
You can now set up appropriate options for this printer. Note that you can create multiple queues with different settings, for example one for draft mode and one for high quality.
There are a number of Samba configuration issues that cause problems; a common problem is translation from UNIX newlines (\n) to Windows newlines (\r\n). It's important to ensure that sending raw data, with no translation, to the printer.