[Digikam-devel] [Bug 150009] large print is sent to printer but is taking hours to print - when opening with gimp->print then no problems

[Martin Bantz]

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------- Additional Comments From martin.bantz smk dk  2007-09-26 10:55 -------
I'm glad to hear that the reason for the slow printing is established - this was a big concern to us - I had parallel investigations going on with cups/jetdirect, but I'm now sure that the QT postscript level 1 driver/handling is the main issue.

What strikes me, is that a lot of people must have this problem - so I'm pleased we can assist in sorting things out.

The suggestion about being able to select the printengine would certainly work for us. Then, when QT can provide more efficient printhandling - the user will be able to change back to the QT engine.

To come by the issue - we tell the schoolkids (there were 80 in class last week) to use the open-with feature and use Gimp. We are trying to teach users using Gimp, and it's printengine (GuthenPrint), is reliable, blazingly fast and has all the options we need. Only problem is when the kids are not listening :-) then they clog up the printqueue :-)

As an aside, our conservation team at the museum needs X-ray images of a large Jordaens piece stitched together - and I'm using Gimp to level the image correctly, but we need 16 bit handling but Gimp handles only 8 bit. Can this group recommend a 16 bit system to us?

Thank you all for this very impressing and interesting discussion,

Martin Bantz
Royal Museum of Fine Art
Denmark

 

-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
Fra: owner bugs kde org [mailto:owner bugs kde org] På vegne af Joerg Kuehne
Sendt: 25. september 2007 22:37
Til: Martin Bantz
Emne: [Bug 150009] large print is sent to printer but is taking hours to print - when opening with gimp->print then no problems
Prioritet: Lav

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------- Additional Comments From joerg.kuehne lycos de  2007-09-25 22:37 ------- After further investigations about the KDE/Qt print mechanism I found out that the printing problem with digikam/printwizard is a Qt problem. The Qt postscript driver is very poor and can only create postscript level 1. The resolution of the image is not the problem. It seems that the image is embedded with the original size. The larger the source image the larger the postscript file. But many printer driver use ghostscript to create raster files and the postscript created with Qt is very inefficient. Preview and further processing takes very long. Gimp uses gimp-print or gutenprint, which can create a postscript level 3 file. Ghostscript can process this file much much faster when viewing and printing. I think there is nothing to be done.

Maybe you can try the program photoprint (http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/photoprint_news.shtml). It can be called from digikam context menu "Open with ...". It uses gutenprint directly and prints very fast.

JK