[Openicc] Epson HTM CUPS drivers

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 7, 2011, at 7:22 PM, edmund ronald wrote:
> 
> 
> There are people who use Gutenprint to do profiled printing on 44"
> printers. The stability of Gutenprint across platforms and upgrades is
> a persuasive argument for print shops, as is the unfailing support for
> obsolescing devices.

Yeah that's a different market in my opinion. Those guys need to get a commercial RIP for photo printing: hot folders, nesting, crop markes, slug lines to keep jobs separated. Being able to drop a tagged TIFF into a hot folder that exactly describes the output conditions is a lot easier than dealing with a print driver dialog from any application. And that gets you identical user interface and prints from any platform. You could even use Dropbox on an iPhone to drop images onto such a hot folder. So for commercial, I think avoiding the complexities of OS print dialog boxes, is something they need. Plus they need support. Otherwise they're an R&D company.


> Image dimensions don't line up precisely between the two drivers
> though, which is annoying for the pros and needs fixing. Epson's
> drivers have had issues too though - remember the A4 centering bug?
> 
> I'm sure users would be well served by a port of the Epson drivers.
> However, as far as I can see Gutenprint is now quite competitive if
> you have the ability to tune it, and a future version should bring
> this quality to most users via canned media settings and profiles.
> Epson hardware is now very stable, so canned profiles port well across
> different machine samples.

I think a tool that creates a locked down PPD to present fully packaged settings is what any mortal person really wants. That tool can expose all kinds of stuff if you want. But for the primary print dialog to present 24 panels of incoherent (to normal people) options is, IMO, going to go no where. That's turning that person's bedroom or office into a laboratory requiring a lot of experimentation. The tuning is painful and really iterative, and the UI makes the tuning way harder than it really needs to be. There aren't 255 levels of granularity for paper thickness.

So I'll buy off on high end printing wanting more control than in the Epson driver, but they're better off getting a commercial product so they can bake those settings and attach them to a folder to guarantee that those settings are always used 100% reliably for all users on the network. They will also want workflow assistance with printing, not just good color.

I still think the target audience is regular people who just want to hit print and get a good picture. They not going to go investigating these settings at all.


Chris