MW Software has released a new set of high quality printer drivers ported from the Gutenprint project. Formerly known as Gimp-Print, the software is said to support at least 750 printer models, and Epson inkjet devices in particular.MW Software's Martin Wuerthner announced this week that he had ported the latest stable version of the Gutenprint drivers, which will require RISC OS 3.5 or higher. The drivers work with any application that prints via the standard RISC OS printing system - such as Draw, ArtWorks, Ovation Pro, and Impression.
Martin said: "Gutenprint, formerly named Gimp-Print, is a suite of printer drivers that provide high quality printing for Unix, Mac OS and Linux systems.
"In many cases these drivers equal or exceed proprietary vendor-supplied drivers in quality and functionality, and can be used for demanding printing tasks requiring flexibility and high quality."
It is understood Gutenprint supports many more new printers compared to the previous Gimp-Print port, and its output is of a higher quality. Gutenprint also supports a number of new printer features, including 'borderless' printing for some Epson models. The drivers also support different media types, such as plain paper and glossy photo paper, and allow the user to fine-tune the colour output of the printer.
The software is available to anyone generous enough to bung Martin a 20 to 30 quid donation for his work, £15 for existing Gimp-Print port users, or 10 quid for hard up punters. An XScale or ARM9-powered computer with at least 64M of RAM is recommended, although Martin warned that "even on the fastest RISC OS machines, Gutenprint is rather slow when printing at the highest quality settings."
Links
RISC OS port of Gutenprint - supported models list