waste more trees
In an effort to help people to waste more trees, I’ve spent some time lately to improve the GIMP Print plug-in. The main reason for starting with this is bug #480086. We’ve got lots of reports from users on the Windows platform that adjusting the paper size caused the Print dialog to become unresponsive. The problem is the button in the upper right corner of the GIMP 2.4 Print dialog:
Since this problem is unlikely ever to be fixed in GTK+, we had to find a solution in the GIMP Print plug-in. The solution is to behave like other applications and to offer this functionality in a dedicated menu item labelled “Page Setup”. This is handled in bug #513291.
Working on this bug gave the opportunity to improve some other aspects of the Print plug-in. It now uses less memory, the preview has become faster and provides better feedback when you adjust the image on the page. Without the button, the dialog also looks less cluttered:
February 27th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
What is being done with the Page Setup tab in the dialog, is there going to be both a tab and a menu item with that name?
February 27th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Please ask the GTK+ developers. The rest of this dialog is not under our control. It’s platform and printer specific.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Thanks for that dialog. it’s really great (even already in 2.4.0).
There is just one downside: i’m using gimp on both windows (at work) and linux (at home). and now for the first time i prefer gimp on windows… because on my ubuntu box, gimp only offers to print with the “gutenprint” backend.
in my opinion the gimp-print plugin about which you talk here is so much better… gutenprint has so many buttons, options, i never even printed with it.
do the gimp developers still encourage using gutenprint on linux? or is it just badly setup on my linux box (which i’m upgrading since 5.10 so maybe in ubuntus which were setup recently it’s OK)?
anyway.. i wish gutenprint would just go away and there would just be gimp-print… so much better IMHO.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
For whatever reason Ubuntu decided to compile GIMP without the Print plug-in and to ship with the gutenprint plug-in instead. If you disagree with this choice, perhaps you should file a bug report in the Ubuntu bug-tracker asking them to change this.
March 1st, 2008 at 3:49 pm
sven, thanks for the info. I wanted to report the bug but in the process i found it was already done:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gimp/+bug/156765
it is fixed in hardy, which will use the gimp print plugin, however 7.10 will not get the update.
December 7th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
I can’t tell you how much I miss Gimp’s old auto rotate and scale printing.
I am involved in the scanning, restoring, and reprinting of old POP (permanently out of print) sheet music for a town band that I direct. Frequently the conductor’s score is full sized while the individual musicians’ parts are half sized.
Older musicians, many of whom are found in the hundreds (if not thousands) of town bands in the United States, due to their poor eyesight, prefer their music as large as they can get it. To that end, I try to print all my parts as large as possible while still fitting them on an 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.
Using GIMP, I used to just scan in the part, edit, and save. Printing was then just a matter of retrieving the part and hitting Ctrl-P. All parts would automatically come out as large as possible, reoriented if necessary. It was wonderful.
Needless to say, that is no longer the case. When it comes to restoring old band music, life has become much, much more complex.
February 10th, 2010 at 12:37 am
Peter, why don’t you install the gutenprint plug-in then? It’s not that we removed anything. We’ve just added another Print plug-in. One that is simple and works on all platforms. You can of course still install the third-party gutenprint plug-in if you prefer that for whatever reason.