Photo printing

Mr Green · 2006-01-21 09:00:10

Hi,
I use Digikam atm for managing photos but printing them is a different story

Cups is set up but I do not seem to be able to get photos printed

Printer is a Epson C46 & I am trying out glossy inkjet paper 6x4

Never tried printing photos before so you will have to forgive my ignorance ;-S

Does anyone know of a good photo printing package?

TIA

tomk · 2006-01-21 10:17:14

Can't help you, I'm afraid, but I can sympathise - I have the same problem, except with HP gear. I can do a nice glossy test page from CUPS, but none of my applications knows the printer even exists. After trying everything I could think of, I put the printer away two weeks ago, just to get a break from the frustration!

So if anyone has ideas, I'd love to hear them too.

gradgrind · 2006-01-21 12:06:11

Have you tried the GIMP?

It works for me on an Epson CX5400, including 6x4 glossy, but I haven't managed borderless printing, according to linuxprinting.org this is not (yet) supported.

tomk · 2006-01-21 12:37:51

Yeah, tried GIMP - it seems to have it's own list of printers, none of them corresponding to the one actually in use. Am I missing some config option somewhere?

gradgrind · 2006-01-21 17:14:25

If you're using an HP printer you may need hpijs, or hplip. Consult linuxprinting.org and/or hpinkjet.sourceforge.net. I also have an HP printer (needs hplip), which is not so easy under GIMP - you need to do postscript output to the normal CUPS printer driver. On my Deskjet 6540 I can even do borderless printing, but it is not easy (export to .ps at 6x4 and then print this separately, e.g. with the hplip toolbox).

Dusty · 2006-01-21 17:27:43

Gimp with Gimp-print does wonders for me. You have to be sure to select the right options in the gimp print dialog though, because I think it tries to print in postscript format be default.

Dusty

tomk · 2006-01-21 18:57:48

I've tried both hplip and hpijs - I have hpijs installed at the moment, because the hplip toolbox wouldn't work for me. I guess I'll do some more reading, when I'm in the right mood - at the moment, advice like "do postscript output to the normal CUPS driver", although very welcome, leaves me wishing for my old Debian days, where you set up a printer in CUPS, and you could then see it in the print dialog in other apps.

Dusty - are you saying that letting it do postscript by default is wrong? As I mentioned, GIMP shows me a list of printers that has nothing to do with actual hardware reality, and does not correspond with the list of available printers in CUPS either.

gradgrind · 2006-01-21 20:19:37

Where a gimp-print driver is available, it can be selected in the gimp printing dialog and should work. If there is no gimp-print driver, which for HP printers is generally the case, the default postscript output is correct, but - if I remember correctly - it could be that you need to change the print command ('-oraw' is almost certainly wrong). If you have kde installed try using just 'kprinter' here. I'm afraid I don't know how to summon up the gnome printer. Otherwise 'lp -s -d<printer-name>', or maybe just 'lpr'?
I assume you have the printer properly set up in CUPS? gtklp might be another possibility. It could be that you have to set up several printer names if you want to print to various formats.

Mr Green · 2006-01-22 17:54:23

Emmm gtklp works but raw camera image is too large for paper so it will need scaling down to fit (6x4)

gimp-print for me anyway does not work ... shows printing but no output ;-(

Will gtklp scale image to fit paper ? (will look into that!)

mac57 · 2006-01-22 18:13:12

I had this same problem. I went through the full printer setup recipe, and got a shiny new test page off my printer from CUPS. Then I fired up Abiword and tried to print a test page. Zero - Abiword didn't seem to see the printer. Then I tried gnumeric - Zero again - gnumeric didn't see the printer. In desperation I opened a command prompt, typed in a short text file, and issued the command

lp textfile.txt

Success! It worked, so I knew that apps *could* see the printer, just not any of the apps I had tried. Multiple neurons fired at the same time at this point and I suspected I must be missing a set of print libraries for the programs I was working with. Realizing that both Abiword and gnumeric are classed as part of the Gnome Office suite, I went hunting for gnome print libraries.

Success! I found and installed libgnomecups and libgnomeprint-cups, and instantly Abiword and gnumeric were able to see and use the printer.

The moral of this story is that you may need to load specific print interface libraries for the programs you are using. I suspect that if I ever decided to use any KDE apps (I am purposely avoiding the "weight" of KDE in my current installation) I would have to find and load KDE printer interface libraries.

If you can print from the command line as a normal user, all is well in your setup, and you just need to load some print interface libraries. Good luck!

tomk · 2006-01-23 12:22:38

Useful stuff mac - thanks. For me, it turned out there was a more fundamental problem - CUPS was totally borked. The response to lpr was

lpr: error - scheduler not responding!

I googled the error message, and found a post on some LUG ML about stracing the command. Doing that convinced me I needed a clean reinstall of cups ( and I did hplip as well, for good measure), so now I'm printing.

But... I still have the same problem as you, Mr Green - getting the image to fit the paper. Did you find out anything?

Kern · 2006-01-23 12:38:10

i use the Gimp, gimp-print stuff, and Cups. epson r300 printer.

sorting sizes for me is 2 stage.

The cups interface on localhost:631 to sort through the options for paper size.

Gimp to edit the size, canvas and so on.

Remember too that whichever format, portrait or landscape, the printer always expects the paper to go in in the portrait orientation.

if its a "non listed" printer, maybe load the driver manually or use the nearest one and tweak the settings, margins etc..

also worth a look -:> epson developers

Mr Green · 2006-01-23 14:16:13

tomk wrote:

But... I still have the same problem as you, Mr Green - getting the image to fit the paper. Did you find out anything?

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Lite_Quickies/

shows you how to scale down image to fit ... I did try gtklp & that seems to works ....

gimp-print not working for me yet!!

Although scaled down image is very poor .... compared to photo image .... may be just that my cheap printer is not up to the job ....

With cups I have to restart printer from localhost every time I use printer which is a real pain ... I tried to add user (lppasswd -a <user>) but I get file not found error .....

So at the moment I run cups using root which is not a good thing at all

HTH

Arch Linux

#1 2006-01-21 09:00:10

Photo printing

#2 2006-01-21 10:17:14

Re: Photo printing

#3 2006-01-21 12:06:11

Re: Photo printing

#4 2006-01-21 12:37:51

Re: Photo printing

#5 2006-01-21 17:14:25

Re: Photo printing

#6 2006-01-21 17:27:43

Re: Photo printing

#7 2006-01-21 18:57:48

Re: Photo printing

#8 2006-01-21 20:19:37

Re: Photo printing

#9 2006-01-22 17:54:23

Re: Photo printing

#10 2006-01-22 18:13:12

Re: Photo printing

#11 2006-01-23 12:22:38

Re: Photo printing

#12 2006-01-23 12:38:10

Re: Photo printing

#13 2006-01-23 14:16:13

Re: Photo printing

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