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Linux Printing HOWTO
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15.1. Ghostscript and Photos

15.1. Ghostscript and Photos

Ghostscript has some difficulties rendering color photographs through most drivers. The problems are several:

  • Many drivers have poorly tuned color support. Often the colors don't match the Windows driver output or the screen. OTOH, all drivers, and Ghostscript as a whole, have readily adjustable color support; the "Gamma" settings (seeSection 10.2.2) are one thing to play with, and there are others documented in Ghostscript'sUse.htm documentation file.

  • I'm only aware of one Ghostscript driver with support for 6 and 7 color printing; it's in beta at the moment and supports most Epson Stylus Photo models. It is rumored to produce better color than the Windows driver (!). The Ghostscript driver core itself provides no support for non CMYK or RGB colors; arguably, some work to put that there is needed.

  • Ghostscript often ends up dithering coarsely, or generating printouts with artifacts like banding. The dithering can usually be corrected; see Section 10.2.3, and read the documentation for your driver.

You should be able to correct some of these problems by tuning Ghostscript; see Section 10 for more information on how to do this. Fiddling with Ghostscript options is much easier if you declare them as options in your spooling system.

That said, the obvious solution for now is to use non-Ghostscript software for printing photos, and indeed, such things do exist. The main contender is the print plugin in the Gimp, which supports pixel-for-pixel printing on Epson Styluses and Postscript printers (with basic PPD support). That Epson Stylus portion of that driver is available for Ghostcript, as well, as thestp driver. Also possible to use for this purpose are the assorted external pnm-to-foo programs used to print on printers like the cheap Lexmarks; these print attempt to print pixmaps pixel-for-pixel.

The best solution, of course, is to buy a Postscript printer; such printers can usually be completely controlled from available free software, and will print to the full capability of the printer.

Linux Printing HOWTO
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