[CREATE] Print, the last frontier

[Yuval Levy]

Since there are talks of magazines, I'd like to make people on this list aware 
of a limitation I found when printing from LG application in Linux.

I don't print often, and when I do it is mostly boring office stuff.  But from 
time to time I like to print proofs of my photos.  I own two Brother printers: 
a laser HL-2070N and an all-in-one MFC-6490CW.  I went with the Brother brand 
after researching issues important to me such as Linux support [0].

Unfortunately I had to discover that the closed source drivers for Linux have 
more unfinished edges than those for Windows, and the bottom line is that the 
same document looks better printed from Windows than from Linux - no matter if 
it is a GoogleMap from the web; a spreadsheet; or my latest picture.

Things that annoy me particularly:
- the MFC-6490CW has a borderless mode.  When I print a picture from 
Photoshop/Windows, it works as advertised.  When I print a picture from 
GIMP/Kubuntu, there is consistently a thin white border on at least one edge.
- the UI to the driver is more consistent in Windows than in Kubuntu.  This is 
particularly nasty with the MFC-6490CW which has two paper trays, one of which 
I loaded with tabloid (11x17) paper.  It is frustrating to see Inkscape output 
a letter format (and only half of it) because some obscure settings are 
inaccessible in the driver.

I know that people here can't do much about closed source drivers.  
Unfortunately the last time I tried the open source drivers for these 
printers, the result where even worse (e.g. coarse dithering patterns).

Is it just me who did not research the products well enough before buying?  
Should I switch brand?

It would pain me - the scanner of the MFC-6490CW serves me well.  The other 
day I had a 300+ pages document to scan.  The automated document feeder and a 
small shell script controlling scanimage [1] and ImageMagick [2] did the trick 
much faster in Kubuntu than I could have done in Windows, and despite the less 
than optimal condition of the original papers, I only had six pages to repeat 
manually after quality control.

Is there something that we can do about this state of affair?  I mean, I tried 
to give feedback to Brother's support, and they were helpful assisting with 
usage of the drivers as they are, but they don't seem to be taking bug 
reports.

IMHO as long as consumers/small office printers output is not at least 
equivalent to that in Windows, open source operating systems don't stand a 
chance to compete in the print arena.

Yuv


[0] http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/index.html
[1] http://www.sane-project.org/man/scanimage.1.html
[2] http://www.imagemagick.org/
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